Father-Infant Interactions Reduce Behavior Problems at One Year

Here is another study offering further evidence that fathers are very important in the well-being of children. The two-parent family should never be forced when it is unhealthy, but the evidence keeps piling up that kids do better in a home with two loving, attentive parents/care-givers. The outcome was better for boys than for girls in this study, which may suggest the importance of bonding with a same-sex parent/care-giver.

Child's behavior linked to father-infant interactions, study shows

Posted On: July 18, 2012

Children whose fathers are more positively engaged with them at age three months have fewer behavioural problems at age twelve months, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust. The study suggests that interventions aimed at improving parent-child interaction in the early post-natal period may be beneficial to the child's behaviour later on in life.

Behavioural disorders are the commonest psychological problem affecting children. They are associated with a wide range of problems in adolescence and adult life, including academic failure, delinquency, peer rejection and poor psychiatric and physical health. Research suggests that the roots of enduring behavioural problems often extend back into the preschool years.

Epidemiological studies have identified a number of risk factors for the onset and continuity of behavioural problems. Amongst these, parenting characteristics and patterns of parent-child interaction appear to be particularly important. However, studies of parental factors usually focus on the role of the mother.

In a study published today in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, researchers at the University of Oxford studied 192 families recruited from two maternity units in the UK to see whether there was a link between father-child interactions in the early postnatal period and the child's behaviour.

Dr Paul Ramchandani, a researcher and clinical psychiatrist, now based at the Academic Unit of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Medicine, Imperial College London, led the study, which assessed father-infant interactions in the family home when the child was aged 3 months and compared these against the child's behaviour at age 12 months.

The researchers found that key aspects of the father-infant interaction, measured very early in children's lives, were associated with an increased risk of behavioural problems in children at an early age. This is the first time that this apparent influence has been demonstrated for observed father-infant interaction and such early onset behaviour problems.

"We found that children whose fathers were more engaged in the interactions had better outcomes, with fewer subsequent behavioural problems. At the other end of the scale children tended to have greater behavioural problems when their fathers were more remote and lost in their own thoughts, or when their fathers interacted less with them," explains Dr Ramchandani. "This association tended to be stronger for boys than for girls, suggesting that perhaps boys are more susceptible to the influence of their father from a very early age.

"We don't yet know whether the fathers being more remote and disengaged are actually causing the behavioural problems in the children, but it does raise the possibility that these early interactions are important."

The researchers believe there are a number of possible explanations for the association. The lack of paternal engagement could reflect wider problems in family relationships, with fathers who are in a more troubled relationship with their partner finding it more challenging to engage with their infant. Alternatively, it may reflect a broader lack of supervision and potentially care, for the infant, resulting in an increase in behavioural disturbance. Another possibility is that the infant's behaviour represents its attempt to elicit a parental reaction in response to an earlier lack of parental engagement.

Dr Ramchandani adds: "Focusing on the infant's first few months is important as this is a crucial period for development and the infant is very susceptible to environmental influences, such as the quality of parental care and interaction.

"As every parent knows, raising a child is not an easy task. Our research adds to a growing body of evidence which suggests that intervening early to help parents can make a positive impact on how their infant develops."

Source: Wellcome Trust

When Men Can't or Won't Talk About Sexual Abuse

As a trauma therapist working with survivors of rape, abuse, and/or molestation, I was deeply troubled that former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was able to sexually molest boys, including his own adopted son, for more than 35 years without anyone coming forward to press charges until the parents of one young man reported Sandusky to police sometime in or before 2009.

Until the Grand Jury investigation began, not a single young man felt safe enough or strong enough to come forward and tell someone what had happened to him. This silence is much more common in boys and young men than it is in girls and young women. We have created support and safety for female survivors to come forward, but this is missing for males.
 
Based on research, we know that 1 in 4women experience rape, sexual abuse, or molestation before the age of 18 - and we know now that the numbers are not much lower for men, at 1 in 6 (Finkelhor, David, et al.  1990. "Sexual Abuse in a National Survey of Adult Men and Women: Prevalence, Characteristics, and Risk Factors"). Some research indicates 1 in 5 boys experience sexual abuse before the age of 16.

When we can't or won't talk about this reality, it goes on and more boys are victimized. I can't remember which site I found this statistic on, but it was not lost on me that pedophiles who prefer boys will molest 120 boys before being caught (on average), while those who prefer girls will molest 85 or so before being caught. Maybe if our boys felt safe to report these things, the numbers would not be so skewed.

Survivors of abuse face a lot of challenges. According to the World Health Organization (2002), victims of sexual assault are:

• 3 times more likely to suffer from depression.
• 6 times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
• 13 times more likely to abuse alcohol.
• 26 times more likely to abuse drugs.
• 4 times more likely to contemplate suicide. 

With these likely outcomes from sexual abuse in childhood, it saddens me that there are so many myths and stigmas for men who survived sexual abuse. The excellent site, 1in6, offers support and resources - and the most useful piece is exposing facts and myths around male survivors.

Young men should be exposed to this information as part of all sex education programs, and in church programs, and in the Boy Scouts, or sorts teams. This should be common knowledge.

Before addressing the myths, let’s review some key facts:

1. Boys and men can be sexually used or abused, and it has nothing to do with how masculine they are.
2. If a boy liked the attention he was getting, or got sexually aroused during abuse, or even sometimes wanted the attention or sexual contact, this does not mean he wanted or liked being manipulated or abused, or that any part of what happened, in any way, was his responsibility or fault.
3. Sexual abuse harms boys and girls in ways that are similar and different, but
   equally harmful.
4. Boys can be sexually abused by both straight men and gay men. Sexual abuse is the result of abusive behavior that takes advantage of a child’s vulnerability and is in no way related to the sexual orientation of the abusive person.
5. Whether he is gay, straight or bisexual, a boy’s sexual orientation is neither the cause or the result of sexual abuse. By focusing on the abusive nature of sexual abuse rather than the sexual aspects of the interaction, it becomes easier to understand that sexual abuse has nothing to do with a boy’s sexual orientation.
6. Girls and women can sexually abuse boys. The boys are not “lucky,” but exploited
   and harmed.
7. Most boys who are sexually abused will not go on to sexually abuse others.

Myth 1 — Boys can’t be sexually used or abused, and if one is, he can never be a “real man.”

Everyone absorbs the myth that males aren’t victims, to some extent. It’s central to masculine gender socialization, and boys pick up on it very early in life. This myth implies that a boy or man who has been sexually used or abused will never be a “real man.” Our society expects males to be able to protect themselves. Successful men are depicted as never being vulnerable, either physically or emotionally. (See How It Can Be Different for Men and How Being Male Can Make It Hard to Heal.)

Whether you agree with that definition of masculinity or not, boys are not men. They are children. They are weaker and more vulnerable than those who sexually abuse or exploit them – who use their greater size, strength and knowledge to manipulate or coerce boys into unwanted sexual experiences and staying silent. This is usually done from a position of authority (e.g., coach, teacher, religious leader) or status (e.g. older cousin, admired athlete, social leader), using whatever means are available to reduce resistance, such as attention, special privileges, money or other gifts, promises or bribes, even outright threats.

What happens to any of us as children does not need to define us as adults or men. It is important to remember that that 1 in 6 boys are sexually abused before age 18 (see The 1 in 6 Statistic), and that those boys can grow up to be strong, powerful, courageous and healthy men. Examples are found on our website (see Other Guys Like Me), and there are many others out there.

Myth 2 — If a boy experienced sexual arousal during abuse, he wanted and/or enjoyed it, and if he ever did partly want the sexual experiences, then they were his fault.

Many boys and men believe this myth and feel lots of guilt and shame because they got physically aroused during the abuse. It is important to understand that males can respond to sexual stimulation with an erection or even an orgasm – even in sexual situations that are traumatic or painful. That’s just how male bodies and brains work. Those who sexually use and abuse boys know this. They often attempt to maintain secrecy, and to keep the abuse going, by telling the child that his sexual response shows he was a willing participant and complicit in the abuse. “You wanted it. You liked it,” they say.
But that doesn’t make it true. Boys are not seeking to be sexually abused or exploited. They can, however, be manipulated into experiences they do not like, or even understand, at the time. (See Guilt and Shame.)

There are many situations where a boy, after being gradually manipulated with attention, affection and gifts, feels like he wants such attention and sexual experiences. In an otherwise lonely life (for example, one lacking in parental attention or affection – even for a brief period), the attention and pleasure of sexual contact from someone the boy admires can feel good.

But in reality, it’s still about a boy who was vulnerable to manipulation. It’s still about a boy who was betrayed by someone who selfishly exploited the boy’s needs for attention and affection to use him sexually. (See Sorting It Out for Yourself, which discusses feeling like you (partly) ‘wanted’ it then but now seeing it as an unwanted experience, in terms of it being part of your life and having continuing negative effects.)

Myth 3 — Sexual abuse is less harmful to boys than girls.

Most studies show that the long term effects of sexual abuse can be quite damaging for both males and females. One large study, conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, found that the sexual abuse of boys was more likely to involve penetration of some kind, which is associated with greater psychological harm.

The harm caused by sexual abuse mostly depends on things not determined by gender, including: the abuser’s identity, the duration of the abuse, whether the child told anyone at the time, and if so, whether the child was believed and helped.

Many boys suffer harm because adults who could believe them and help are reluctant, or refuse, to acknowledge what happened and the harm it caused. This increases the harm, especially the shame felt by boys and men, and leads many to believe they have to “tough it out” on their own. And that, of course, makes it harder to seek needed help in the midst of the abuse, or even years later when help is still needed. (See How Unwanted or Abusive Sexual Experiences Can Cause Problems and How Being Male Can Make It Hard to Heal.)

Myth 4 — Most men who sexually abuse boys are gay.

Studies about this question suggest that men who have sexually abused a boy most often identify as heterosexual and often are involved in adult heterosexual relationships at the time of abusive interaction. There is no indication that a gay man is more likely to engage in sexually abusive behavior than a straight man and some studies even suggest it is less likely. But sexual abuse is not a sexual “relationship,” — it’s an assault. The sexual orientation of the abusive person is not really relevant to the abusive interaction. A man who sexually abuses or exploits boys is not engaging in a homosexual interaction – any more than men who sexually abuse or exploit girls are engaging in heterosexual behavior. He is a deeply confused individual who, for various reasons, desires to sexually use or abuse a child, and has acted on that desire. (See Why Do People Sexually Use or Abuse Children?)

Myth 5 — Boys abused by males must have attracted the abuse because they are gay or they become gay as a result.

There are different theories about how sexual orientation develops, but experts in human sexuality do not believe that sexual abuse or premature sexual experiences play a significant role. There is no good evidence that someone can “make” another person be homosexual or heterosexual. Sexual orientation is a complex issue and there is no single answer or theory that explains why someone identifies himself as homosexual, heterosexual or bi-sexual.

It is common, however, for boys and men who have been abused to express confusion about their sexual identity and orientation, whether they identify as straight, gay or bi-sexual. Some guys who identify as heterosexual, fear that, due to their experiences as boys, they must “really” be homosexual. They may believe this would mean that they can’t be a “real man,” as defined by the larger society. Even men who clearly indentify as heterosexual, and men who project very traditional heterosexual traits , may fear that others will “find them out” as gay or not real men. Men who identify as gay or bi-sexual may wonder if their sexual orientation was influenced in any way by the abusive experience or may even be the cause of their orientation. (See How It Can Be Different for Men.)

Also, many boys abused by males wonder if something about them sexually attracted the person who abused them and will unknowingly attract other males who will misuse them. While these are understandable fears, they are not true. One of the great tragedies of childhood sexual abuse is how it robs a person’s natural right to discover his own sexuality in his own time.

It is very important to remember that abuse arises from the abusive persons’s failure to develop and maintain healthy adult sexual relationships, and his or her willingness to sexually use and abuse kids. It has nothing to do with the preferences or desires of the child who is abused, and therefore cannot determine a person’s natural sexual identity.

Myth 6 — If a female used or abused a boy, he was “lucky,” and if he doesn’t feel that way there’s something wrong with him.

This myth, like several of the others, comes from the image of masculinity that boys learn from very early. It says not only that males can’t be sexually abused, but that any sexual experience with girls and women, especially older ones, is evidence that he’s a “real man.” Again, the confusion comes from focusing on the sexual aspect rather than the abusive one – the exploitation and betrayal by a more powerful, trusted or admired person (who can be a child or adult).

In reality, premature, coerced or otherwise abusive or exploitive sexual experiences are never positive – whether they are imposed by an older sister, sister of a friend, baby sitter, neighbor, aunt, mother, or any other female in a position of power over a boy. At a minimum, they cause confusion and insecurity. They almost always harm boys’ and men’s capacities for trust and intimacy.

A gay man who experienced sexual arousal when abused by a female may wonder whether it means that he is actually straight or wonder what it means that he was chosen by a woman or older girl.

Being sexually used or abused, whether by males or females, can cause a variety of other emotional and psychological problems. However, boys and men often don’t recognize the connections between what happened and their later problems. To be used as a sexual object by a more powerful person, male or female, is never a good thing, and can cause lasting harm.

Myth 7 — Boys who are sexually abused will go on to abuse others.

This myth is especially dangerous because it can create terrible fear in boys and men. They may not only fear becoming abusers themselves, but that others will find out they were abused and believe they’re a danger to children. Sadly, boys and men who tell of being sexually abused often are viewed more as potential perpetrators than as guys who need support.

While it is true that many (though by no means all) who sexually abuse children have histories of sexual abuse, it is NOT true that most boys who are sexually abused go on to sexually abuse others. The majority of boys do not go on to become sexually abusive as adolescents or adults; even those who do perpetrate as teenagers, if they get help when they’re young, usually don’t abuse children when they become adults. (See Am I Going to Become an Abuser? What if I Already Have?)

Believing these myths is understandable, but dangerous and harmful, and needs to be overcome.

• These are myths that everyone absorbs growing up, and continues to hear as adults, usually without even thinking about it. So of course some boys and men will, at least for a while, believe them and suffer the consequences.
• So long as societies believe these myths, and teach them to children from their earliest years, many men harmed by unwanted or abusive sexual experiences won’t get the recognition and help they need.
• So long as boys or men harmed by unwanted or abusive sexual experiences believe these myths, they will feel ashamed and be less likely to seek whatever knowledge, understanding and help they need to achieve the lives they want and deserve.
• So long as boys, men and society as a whole believes these myths and males don’t get the help they need, males are more likely to join the minority who end up hurting others.
• And so long as these myths are believed, it increases the power of another devastating myth: that it was the child’s fault. It is never the fault of the child in a sexual situation – although some people are skilled at getting those they use or abuse to take on a responsibility that is always, and only, their own.

For any man harmed by unwanted or abusive sexual experiences – and anyone who wants to support him – becoming free of these myths is necessary to overcoming the effects of the abuse, and to achieving the life he wants and deserves.

Adapted and expanded from an online piece by Ken Singer.

An International Symposium for Men, 2013: Men and the Future: Sex, Authenticity, and Power

There is another conference on men and masculinity coming up in 2013 - An International Symposium for Men, 2013: Men and the Future: Sex, Authenticity, and Power. One of the presenters is Eivind Fiegenschau-Skjellum, the man behind Masculinity Movies, a cool site. The downside is that we have to travel to Germany if we want to b there - so hopefully they will video the talks and share them on YouTube.

An International Symposium for Men 2013 

MEN AND THE FUTURE: SEX, AUTHENTICITY AND POWER

May 23rd to 26th 2013, near Frankfurt Airport in Germany 

Come and join us and:

• contribute to a new vision for masculinity
• enjoy the stimulating presence of other dedicated seekers
• experience the guidance of men who have been involved with men's work for decades

Languages: English and German

The International Symposium is for:

• courageous pioneers
• committed men who want to be a part of the solution
• young men who will inhabit the future
• experts in Menswork as well as the curious

At the International Symposium you can expect to:

• experience the guidance of men who have been involved with Menswork for decades
• contribute to a new vision for masculinity
• enjoy the stimulating presence of other dedicated seekers
• become part of the solution not part of the problem
• feel empowered for the uncertain future
• learn how to face criticism and conflict with women
• discover a new sense of bodily wholeness
• develop confidence in your sexuality and relationships
• rediscover grounded pride in being male

At the International Symposium we invite you to:

• contribute to debates about the role and function of men
• experience cutting-edge presentations from leading facilitators
• take part in workshops with transformative goals
• honour each other in age-old fire rituals
• celebrate in physical games

• experience creative chaos in large group meetings
• discover the excitement of the World Cafe events
• meet with other seekers from around the world
• discover the solidarity of awakening males and make new friend

Who is behind this first International Symposium for Men?

We are a core team of men experienced in men’s issues and workshop presentations:

John Bunzl (UK)
Hans Georg Nelles (D)
Manu Bazanno (I)
Nick Duffell (UK)
Robert Fischer (CH)

These guys and the following will be presenters and animators of your experience:

Eivind Fiegenschau-Skjellum (N)
Daniel Glauser (CH)
Paul Wolflight (UK)
Michael Boyle (UK)
Jon Howell (UK)
Alec von Graffenried (D)
Michael ten Hövel (D)
Hank Earl (UK)
German May (D)
Ivan Verny (CZ)
Axel Klimek (D)
Tom Steininger (A)
Axel Klimek (D)
Ingo Vauk (D)
Geoff lamb (UK)
André Stern (F)
Peter Hess (D)
Jan Bili (CZ)
Gautier Hankenne (B)
Darrel Hunneybell (UK)…
and others to be announced…

Find out more about them and discover their vision by clicking on their names.

You can begin to take part in this movement NOW by joining in on our discussion forum and  BLOG.

The Challenges of Opposite-Sex Friendships

For most of my life I have had as many female friends as male, and contrary to popular beliefs (such as When Harry Met Sally and other forms of mainstream culture), only once in all those years has one of those friendships transgressed the boundaries of friendship (and it had more to do with my immaturity and substance abuse than any real desire for a romantic relationship).

So it puzzles me when I hear so many people talking about how difficult it is for men and women to be friends without sexual feelings getting in the way. I think, and I am just making a conjecture here, that a lot of people confuse finding someone attractive and being attracted to someone - I'm trying to make a distinction between a feeling of aesthetic and even sensual pleasure in how someone looks vs. being romantically attracted or sexually attracted to that person.

I think this confusion is more common in young people and those who are unhappy in their current relationship. And I also think there is an issue with conflating someone's physical attractiveness with a need or desire to have sex with that person. They are not the necessarily the same things.

A new research article covered at BPS Research Digest (British Psychological Society) tries to explain the challenges of attraction to our opposite sex friends (and I assume this might also apply to our same-sex friends for those of us who don't fall into the false binary of gay/straight). Overall, it seems most people (by a slight majority) find such attraction to be burdensome rather than a benefit.

It seems men struggle with this more and in more ways than do women (granted, these are mostly college students, but they also looked at older adults). Here are some of the results (a survey of 88 pairs of college students in cross-sex friendships, averaging two years' duration):

• Men felt more attraction to their female friend than vice versa.
• Men overestimated how much their friend was attracted to them.
• Men's desire to date their female friend was unaffected by whether they (the men) were in a romantic relationship with someone else.
• Females tended to report less desire to date their male friend if they (the women) were already in a romantic relationship. 
• Male attraction for a female friend was undimmed by the fact their friend had a partner. 
• Women tended to report less attraction for male friends who had partners.

Here is the article.

Just good friends? Attraction to opposite-sex friends is common but burdensome

"Every platonic friend I got is some woman I was trying to ****, I made a wrong turn somewhere, and ended up in the friend zone. 'Oh no, I'm in the friend zone!'" Chris Rock.

They were virtually unheard of for most of human history, but today, in many cultures, friendships between men and women are common place. Still, that niggling doubt never seems to go away - is the relationship really entirely platonic?

A new study by April Bleske-Rechek and her colleagues has investigated cross-sex friendships between heterosexual men and women through the prism of evolutionary theory. From a survey of 88 pairs of college students in cross-sex friendships (averaging two years' duration), the researchers found that: men felt more attraction to their female friend than vice versa; that men overestimated how much their friend was attracted to them; and that men's desire to date their female friend was unaffected by whether they (the men) were in a romantic relationship with someone else, whereas females tended to report less desire to date their male friend, if they (the women) were already in a romantic relationship. Male attraction for a female friend was undimmed by the fact their friend had a partner. By contrast women tended to report less attraction for male friends who had partners.

The participants gave their answers after being reassured they'd be kept anonymous, and after agreeing publicly with their friend not to discuss the study afterwards (I bet they stuck to that!).

The pattern of results makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective on mating strategies, the researchers said, whereby men have more to gain from short-term sexual encounters, whereas women, who invest more in their offspring (in terms of gestation and child-birth), are more selective.

What about the way people deal with their sexual desires for opposite-sex friends? For a second study, over a hundred heterosexual young men and women (average age 19), and an older sample of 142 men and women (average age 37), answered questions about their cross-sex friendships, including listing the costs and benefits. Among the younger sample, 38 per cent were in a (non-marital) romantic relationship; around 90 per cent of the older sample were married.

Again, the researchers said the findings made sense in terms of evolutionary theory. The older sample, most of whom were immersed in a serious long-term relationship, reported less attraction to their opposite-sex friends than the younger sample did. However, this wasn't case for the older single people - they reported just as much attraction to their opposite-sex friends as the younger participants.

Overall, attraction to an opposite-sex friend was more often seen as a burden rather than a benefit of the friendship. Averaged across both samples, attraction was listed as a cost or complication by 32 per cent of participants - five times more often than it was listed as a benefit or enhancement. For young women, and men and women in the older sample, more attraction to their closest friend was associated with feeling less satisfied with their romantic partner.

Zooming in on gender differences, men more often than women, listed attraction to their female friends as a benefit of the friendship, and they were less likely than women to list it as a cost.

"Our findings offer preliminary support for the proposal that men's and women's experiences in cross-sex friendship reflect their evolved mating strategies," Bleske-Rechek and her team concluded. "Attraction between cross-sex friends is common, and it is perceived more often as a burden than as a benefit." Looking ahead, the researchers said it would be interesting to investigate attraction between homosexual same-sex friends, and whether it's seen by them as a burden or benefit of the friendship.

 _________________________________


Bleske-Rechek A.,, Somers, E., Micke, C., Erickson, L., Matteson, L., Stocco, C., Schumacher, B., and Ritchie, L. (2012). Benefit or burden? Attraction in cross-sex friendship. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships DOI: 10.1177/0265407512443611

Further reading, from the New York Times: "A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?"

Don Dianda - Learning to Embrace Our Inner Demons

Yesterday I posted on ending unhealthy cycles and transitions into new phases of our lives - and a part of that entry included a personal story by Don Dianda, author of See for your Self: Zen Mindfulness for the Next Generation, about his struggle to awaken from the self-numbing he had been doing in his life (a story all too familiar to me).

The slow change within my heart had been an ongoing process. There had been an upswelling of feeling and emotion when I had been alone hiking in the hills or swimming in the ocean. Also, brief moments of disconnect from my social life allowed questions, concerning what I was doing, to bubble up. But fear and doubt coincided with these thoughts. So, naturally I did what I was good at, I dove back into my life with added vigor. I denied. I suppressed all my inner yearnings with more alcohol, more drugs, and more meaningless relationships. I searched for more of the same to fill the growing inner void and outer disconnection—feeding my ego, only to have it come back to me over and over again. There was something deep inside that persisted in repelling my unconscious overtures. Though I did not realize it at the time, my Self was saving me from myself.

Those could easily be my words, right down to the "upswelling of feeling and emotion" that comes when we are alone in nature, when there is space for the still small voice of awareness to be heard.

I liked Dianda's writing, so I looked for more at The Mindful Word blog and came across this one, which I quite like. By the way, The Mindful Word seems like a very cool blog, so check it out.

DOING THE DIRTY WORK: Learning to embrace our inner demons

By Don Dianda | July 13, 2012

In Buddhism, hell or suffering is subtly defined as life lived outside the experience of this moment, where one is easily governed by the rushing nature of the small mind. You aren’t sent to this hell by a patronizing, morally dignified figure. You suffer or put yourself in hell on your own: You judge yourself and the world around you, and so it is your life, your mind, your experience, and thus your choice to be where you are–to be stuck in judgment and reaction or… just to be here, free. If hell could be viewed as the unexamined mind, and more specifically, the demons lurking below the streaming thoughts, then let us descend into the places we might not wish to visit. The process or journey isn’t like Dante’s Inferno. There are no linear explanations, set layers, or encounters with internal guides, just a trail and an unknowable, wild landscape to begin to rediscover.

While there are many instances in Zen lore of people suddenly becoming awakened and moving towards mastership of the ordinary mind, whether it is due to the relevance of modern day psychology or Jungian theory, I often tend to lean towards the notion that one should lie with past grievances first and let them pass through the body and mind in their own way and in their own time before moving more deeply into mindfulness practice. Old nagging memories linger in the unexamined mind. They rot, fester, and manifest as addictions, uncontrollable reactions, anxiety, a need to view life warily, indifference, and a whole slew of mentally created fortresses to hide behind or underneath. Sometimes I will pounce on a sudden negatively charged, grainy thought and follow a chord deep into the caverns of my mind only to find a small demon there making noise and begging for attention. It could be an old grievance, something that happened a few moments before, a hardened opinion… The list goes on, but nevertheless, life is life and I’d like to be here for it. Doing the dirty work and diving inwards is how I go about uncovering freedom.

The inner regions of the mind are not governed by reason or logic. You can only pretend not to notice its total presence. In this inexplicably mysterious place lies a multi-dimensional wilderness full of life and death, vines, demons, decay, Siberian tigers, and flowering cherry blossom trees. It functions best when one applies balance and clear vision. When internal troubles are neglected, like a wildfire, the neglected begins to consume. And in its consumption of your life and your attention, it becomes who you are.

I find it interesting that the very things we wish to keep at bay can in a sense define us. “I don’t ever want to be an angry person like the man who used to abuse me as a child” flips into a kind of fierce defensiveness that was created to wall-out that person, and yet that behaviour lives on and pervades the person’s view of the world for life. Those who experience a sexual assault or abuse might say “I don’t ever want to be with someone like that” and so they push love interests away, or even more strangely, fall for someone capable of committing the same horrific transgressions. I don’t use these examples to try to get you to relate. I bring them up to show how sticky and warped the inner world is, especially when it is neglected and left to its own devices. Our greatest challenges and personal injuries—left shunned and unexamined—seep into our internal wiring and spread into our relationship with life. They help perpetuate the subtle hell—the one that does not allow the world to be the world. But when you turn over this coin, it also becomes apparent that the greatest growth comes from sitting intimately among shunned demons—to breathe their air and laugh their laugh, to hold hands and caw at the descending night.

When I began to realize that depth came from stepping forward and going down into my own mind, I was not prepared for the intensity of moving through a land long bereft of any attention or reverence. This inner world of mine—full of swirling colour, sweat beads, heat, ice, and phantoms—simply needed to be acknowledged and respected, but I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t understand what clarity or patience felt like here. Instead, I headed towards a past grievance from a certain angle with a single-track mind, as if I was some kind of Marlow character slashing my way deep into the heart of an impenetrable wilderness, searching for the ever so elusive and awe-inspiring Kurtz. Through this methodology, my memory or grievance would morph and turn into something else—a new overwhelming issue for me to work with again in an entirely different dimension with altered rules of engagement. I started to realize that doggedly pursuing phantoms wasn’t going to work. Instead of trying to learn from, or push over, or figure out, I thought it could be interesting to embrace a demon and sit with it, no matter the length of time. Letting go in the realms of demons was a strange and powerful move that began to restore balance to my inner regions.

No matter the fortress, rules, or territory that come with facing a demon, sitting and watching quenches the thirst of all boundaries and leads to an opening for a true meeting. The demon is you and you are the demon. This is the practice of oneness.

I often smile at the thought of not doing the dirty work—what the texture of my life would feel like without going into the vastness of my mind to be with what needs to be examined. I might appear successful, happy, totally fine on the surface, but on an internal level, the one that really defines the vital pulse of my connection to life and the world around me, there would be so many deadening walls keeping me from experiencing what is here. And I think it’s important to note that this learning to be is the great gift of doing such work.

I’m under the impression that human beings are extremely intelligent animals capable of doing many things: loving, committing violence, appreciating, living, dying, drinking, working, writing poetry, making mistakes, and laughing. All of these various possibilities contribute to the oneness that binds humanity to the common experience of living a life grounded into the unknown wilderness-like nature of the world and the inner regions. Doing the dirty work in this life doesn’t mean that you’re special or suddenly not an organic creature anymore. You’re just using the gift of the complexity of the mind to tap into depth—the kind that opens the doors to balance. It’s through the simple experience and relishing of life through the medium of our incredibly complex minds that freedom is found.

When I look at our culture, or more accurately, the collective consciousness of our culture, I’m dismayed by the lack of attention the inner regions receive. If our inner regions represent the underbelly of an iceberg—the vast majority of the entire entity—it might behoove us to begin looking underneath—within. So much depends falsely on surface-level achievements, titles, and appearances that at some point I think it’s important not to fall for the dream our modern culture lures us into. When you sit with your own mind, gaze at the billions of galaxies, or contemplate the vastness of geological time, the dream becomes more apparent. I also believe that if happiness is a goal for someone, it might not be outside of the experience of what is here. The things we buy into—our culture, the rampant movements of our small mind, and the desire to seek without instead of within—may be the very barriers between genuine happiness and where we are now.

Ending the Cycle - Perspective and Personal Story

These two posts feel connected in my mind - whether or not they are is up to you, I suppose. The first one is a Daily Om from a while ago, which I may have posted by itself. The second is a personal story by Dan Dianda at The Mindful Word.

Ending the Cycle: Start Today

by Madisyn Taylor

Each day offers us an opportunity to renew our resolve to the universe that we are ready for change.

One of the hardest things in life is feeling stuck in a situation that we don’t like and want to change. We may have exhausted ourselves trying to figure out how to make change, and we may even have given up. However, each day offers us an opportunity to renew our resolve and to declare to the universe that we are ready for change. We may even say out loud that we have tried and struggled and have not found a way, but that we are open to help, and that we intend to keep working to create change for ourselves. Making this declaration to the universe, and to ourselves, may be just the remedy for the stagnation we are experiencing. And, it can be done today, right now.

It is difficult to understand, even with hindsight, how the choices we have made have added up to our current situation, but it is a good idea to examine the story we tell ourselves. If we tend to regard ourselves as having failed, this will block our ability to allow ourselves to succeed. We have the power to change the story we tell ourselves by acknowledging that in the past, we did our best, and we exhibited many positive qualities, and had many fine moments on our path to the present moment. We can also recognize that we have learned from our experiences, and that this will help us with our current choices.

When we do this kind of work on how we view our past self, we make it possible for the future to be based on a positive self-assessment. This inner shift may allow us to get out of the cycle we’ve been in that’s been keeping us stuck. Now we can declare our intentions to the universe, knowing that we have done the inner work necessary to allow our lives to change. Allow today to be the day to end cycles and enter into a new way of being.

I'm not sure about declaring things to the universe, but there are often times in our lives where we wonder how we ended up in this moment and place and situation. All of our choices in the past have led us to this moment, and this moment, and this moment.

If we do like where we find ourselves, it's up to us to change things. Only I can create a new future from this moment forward by making new choices. Each morning that I wake up is a new day in which I can make new choices to create the future I desire - it's never easy, and in fact, change is one of the hardest things for most us to accomplish.

In a post related to this topic, Dan Dianda at The Mindful Word wrote about his own experience with how he "began to question what was going on around me and why I went along without checking in with myself—without questioning the narrative spinning in my head."

Don Dianda is the author of See for your Self: Zen Mindfulness for the Next Generation. Through meditation, daily mindfulness practice, and individual koan work, Dianda seeks to shed light on the inherently deep connection one can have with the experience of this life as well as the world one moves through. Stepping into the now and recognizing the movements within the mind is where the path begins.

Here is his article.

REAL MEANING: A personal essay on questioning the fabricated reality of one’s life 

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”—Matsuo Basho

Growing up in a well-to-do American family is materially comfortable. Family troubles aside—and they can be considerable—life is full of pleasure: desires are satisfied, drinks guzzled and fanciful whims gained. There are high school football games, school days, workdays, sex, travelling, television, Fourth of July celebrations, drama, weekend all-nighters, jokes, cliques, victories, and defeats. Like a giant cliché, life unfolds, and it unfolds around a focal point: me-I-a separate ego. From here good and bad, love and hate, sad, mad, happy, despair, upbeat, low, subject, object, outside, come together to form one’s life experience. To keep some form of sanity, we follow our mind and attempt to gratify its wants and needs as a way to find fulfillment and success. We create stories and follow them. We listen to our thoughts intently—to the point where we eventually become them. We go for more and more. But is that it? I found out. Coming home at three in the morning tired, intoxicated, full of shallow thoughts and loaded with cheap laughs, my life was passing before my eyes.

Throughout my first two years in college, I often had the urge to “black out,” literally. Though I wasn’t conscious enough to be aware of it at the time, I wanted to be able to float through life, running from painful experiences that had rooted themselves into my psyche. The path at the time was simply to ignore any stirrings within and to keep going, to press on, to focus on money and being accepted within the constructs of the society I found myself in. These were the values, but I wasn’t buying them anymore.

Something was shifting inside me. I wasn’t aware of what it was or how it was working. I just began to question what was going on around me and why I went along without checking in with myself—without questioning the narrative spinning in my head.

I changed my life and woke up during my junior year of college: I’d had enough. The drinking didn’t do it for me. The partying didn’t do it for me. Vegas, Miami, L.A., didn’t do it for me. I felt completely strange and insubstantial in my own body. Everything I had created, my ego, my friendships, my internal wiring, my identity—aspects of my external being I had spent years cultivating, shaping and reshaping—were just the bones of a paper tiger in the face of the stirrings of what lay buried beneath. I’d been living in a dream and I was finally beginning to realize it.

The slow change within my heart had been an ongoing process. There had been an upswelling of feeling and emotion when I had been alone hiking in the hills or swimming in the ocean. Also, brief moments of disconnect from my social life allowed questions, concerning what I was doing, to bubble up. But fear and doubt coincided with these thoughts. So, naturally I did what I was good at, I dove back into my life with added vigor. I denied. I suppressed all my inner yearnings with more alcohol, more drugs, and more meaningless relationships. I searched for more of the same to fill the growing inner void and outer disconnection—feeding my ego, only to have it come back to me over and over again. There was something deep inside that persisted in repelling my unconscious overtures. Though I did not realize it at the time, my Self was saving me from myself.

If time passes in the blink of an eye, how could insubstantial things be more valuable than the present moment?

One early morning after going out and drinking, I came home feeling slightly ill. I crawled into bed and passed out, something many of us can relate to. In the night, I dreamed that a powerful, jet-black snake had been sucking vital energy from the back of my neck. Its muscles pulsated with each drink. All I could do was grab it and pull, but to no avail.

Read the whole article.

Bookforum Omnivore - The Gendered Self

Bookforum's Omnivore (a collection of links posted several times daily) recently offered up a collection themed on "The Gendered Self." Among the topics are Simon Baron-Cohen on testosterone, a profile of the MRAs (men's rights activists), and an intriguing article that looks at 30 years of relationship self-help manuals in terms of conservative and liberal discourses of the self (rather than as products of feminism and/or patriarchy).

The gendered self

Jul 11 2012 
9:00AM

• Anca Gheaus (Erasmus): Gender Justice. 
• Rebecca Hazleden (ACU): Dragon-slayers and Jealous Rats: The Gendered Self in Contemporary Self-help Manuals. 
• Elizabeth D. Peturson, Kenneth M. Cramer, and Chantal M. Pomerleau (Windsor): Attributional Errors and Gender Stereotypes: Perceptions of Male and Female Experts on Sex-Typed Material.
• Hillevi Ganetz (Stockholm): Fame Factory: Performing Gender and Sexuality in Talent Reality Television. 
• Testosterone on my mind and in my brain: An interview with Simon Baron-Cohen. 
• As Feminist Review celebrates its 100th issue, Mary Evans assesses its lasting contribution to academic debate. 
• A wide range of writers — including Lori Gottlieb, Hanna Rosin, Andrew Cohen, Kate Bolick — debate Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic cover story on the myth of work-life balance. 
• An increasingly vocal men's movement argues that anti-male discrimination is rife; who are the activists and what do they want? 
• When it comes to negotiating a deal, “males more readily justify moral misconduct by minimizing its consequences or otherwise excusing it.”
• A look at how gender discrimination is sometimes good.

Ozy Frantz and Noah Brand - What About the Men? Why Our Gender System Sucks for Men, Too

This article by Ozy Frantz and Noah Brand originally appeared at The Good Men Project and was reposted at Alternet. This article is from a book in progress by Brand and Frantz. I'll be curious to see the book when they complete it - it may be a welcome addition to men's studies.

What About the Men? Why Our Gender System Sucks for Men, Too

The tools of feminism can also be applied to the damage and deformation that men suffer in our sexist society. 

July 11, 2012  

 

 

If you are anything like us, you spent some time when you were younger playing with optical illusions: the vase that, if you looked at it differently, was two faces; the fish that were also birds; the old woman who was also a young lady.

If you were reading this in a book in a bookstore, and some malicious person had not moved it into the Local Birdwatching category, it would almost certainly be next to some other books about gender. (Yes, this is related.) Look at the other books, and you’d find they have one thing in common—they’re almost all about women. Women and work. Women and body image. Women and race. Women and sex. Women and feminism.

You’d think that only women have a gender.

For a long time, we’ve only been able to see half the illusion—we see the birds, but not the fish; the vases, but not the faces. We’ve noticed the thousands of ways, big and small, that our current gender system wounds women. Rarely, however, and often only as an afterthought does anyone remark on how the current gender system harms men.

 ♦◊♦

We live in a sexist society, one where gender programming starts at birth (though the advent of the sonogram has allowed parents to get a head start by painting the nursery pink or blue and stocking up in advance on gendered toys and clothes) and is so pervasive as to be inescapable. Feminism has done an excellent job analyzing and challenging the ways that these assigned and enforced gender roles damage and deform the lives of women. The same tools of analysis can be applied to the damage and deformation that men suffer. And that damage, sad to say, is severe.

The general term for the incredibly restrictive social codes on male behavior is hegemonic masculinity, though Paul Kivel refers to it as the “Man Box” in his work, and Charlie Glickman clarifies that to the “Act Like a Man Box” to emphasize the performative nature of the restrictions. We choose to use hegemonic masculinity as our term because it is less likely than “Man Box” to be used in a trend piece about how it’s okay for men to own steamer trunks now.

Indeed, the current cultural trend of terms like bromance, guyliner, mancession, and so on -- “bromanteaus” as we call them -- just demonstrates the power of hegemonic masculinity. Anything that might potentially be seen as outside the narrow bounds of acceptable male behavior, such as having a close relationship, wearing makeup, or being out of work, must be given a special name to assure people that it really is masculine, it’s not outside the box in any way.

So what is the box? What are the bounds of hegemonic masculinity? The essence of it is that the things we think of as “manly,” the things a “real man” does or is, are a mess of unreasonable, contradictory and impossible expectations and assumptions. A real man is supposed to be attractive to women, but not do anything for a woman’s approval or attention. A real man is supposed to be stoic and emotionless, but is permitted to show anger. A real man is supposed to be tall and have a big penis, for heaven’s sake, and if your genetic dice didn’t shake out that way, you’d better perform the rest of the list even harder to make up for your supposed deficiency.

Men who do not fit the box of hegemonic masculinity get all kinds of stigmatized. For instance, consider men who want to help raise their children. Stay-at-home dads and men on the “mommy track” often face disapproval and the belief that they “laze around all day” or “aren’t real men.” In public, men are all too often patronized as “Mr. Mom” or treated as though it’s exceptional and startling that they want to spend time with their children; it’s depressingly common for men openly interested in childcare to be called pedophiles.

 

Social pressure has astonishing effects on people’s behavior: just ask any teenager who drove home drunk from a party. Many people find it so unthinkable that men might want to have traditionally feminine jobs such as nurses or teachers that they tend to promote men out of those jobs and into more traditionally masculine positions such as administration; this sounds like an advantage, but most people become nurses to take care of patients, not to deal with paperwork, and it’s based in misandric stereotypes around what men can do. The social pressure to conform to the man box can be internalized, sometimes with tragic effects: unemployment increases a man’s risk of suicide more than it does a woman’s, partially because of the association between masculinity and success.

Even if they don’t experience social pressure, the expectations that they should act in a certain way can disadvantage men who don’t act that way. Straight men are all too often expected to approach women, ask them out, and pay for the date—which causes disproportionate pain to men who are socially awkward, shy or just broke. Male virgins are more likely than their female counterparts to feel shame because of their virginity.

Ultimately, the most important concepts in hegemonic masculinity are “strong," “tough,” and “winner.” Each of these is code for a wealth of symbolism and subconcepts, so that “tough” implies both “stoically emotionless” and “does not seek medical attention.” “Strong” covers “supports his family financially” and “bench-presses more than his bodyweight,” among other things. “Winner” is the key to a Pandora’s box of competition and inadequacy, where the twin concepts of “loser” and “failure” lurk, waiting to consume men’s sense of self at the least excuse.

Even for men who conform to these demands, these ideals of masculinity can burden them. Take toughness, for instance—it’s good to be tough, right? Chuck Norris is tough. Wolverine is tough. Toughness lets you survive in this hard world, keeps you from being weak and vulnerable. That’s a good thing to encourage people to be, right?

Turns out, not so much.

The ideal of physical toughness kills people. Especially men. Except for sex work, the most male-dominated jobs are the most dangerous, from lumberjacks to firefighters to soldiers, men are more likely to be injured on the job and suffer an astonishing 92% of fatal occupational injuries. Historically and cross-culturally, men’s life expectancy is shorter than women’s; in the United States, men tend to live four years less than women. While some of the discrepancy may be biological, much of it is due to socialization: in fact, the level of patriarchy in a society is associated with lower life expectancy for men. Men are encouraged to “tough out” pain and not go to doctors unless they absolutely need to.

Emotional toughness can also cause men pain; if you can’t open up emotionally to another person, it makes it more difficult to have friends. The social support gap is large and growing—men tend to report having fewer close friends and being less connected to their communities than women. For far too many men, romantic relationships are the only acceptable venue for them to express their feelings (and even there, the idea that men hate emotional intimacy limits them). In fact, men tend to report more distress due to a strained romantic relationship, possibly because women are far more likely to have a group of friends to help with the social support. The nervously joking societal construct of “bromance” arises from the notion that having a close male friend is something weird enough that it needs its own name.

Then there’s rape. When was the last time you heard men mentioned as rape or molestation victims in any public discussion of such issues? Despite the fact that 1 in 6 men are subject to unwanted sexual activity before the age of 18, despite the fact that 1 in 4 rape survivors in America is male, far too many people still believe a man cannot be raped, especially by a woman: the myth that an erection is consent, instead of a biological function, remains strong. The Centers for Disease Control’s own statistics draw a line between “rape” and “being forced to penetrate someone.” Not to be rude to the CDC, but we have a word for sex that someone is forced to have against their will. It’s called rape.

Even in cases of boys as young as 13 who are raped by teachers or other authority figures, many people congratulate them or call them lucky. Try to imagine anyone saying that to a 13-year-old girl who was molested by her teacher, and you begin to see how deep the gender gulf is here. In fact, some male rape survivors never acknowledge, even to themselves, that what they endured was rape. Rape of men is endemic within the prison system, which is not treated as a human rights outrage, but as an appropriate subject for jokes. Some even speak glowingly of prison rape as the real deterrent to criminal activity. It’s amazing how many people are downright enthusiastic about their government running rape camps, so long as the victims are male.

The ideal of toughness also impacts male survivors of abuse. Many people believe that men cannot be abused, because they’re “stronger,” or that if a man is abused it’s proof that he’s a wimp or a weakling; many believe that men who were raped are responsible for and enjoyed their rapes. Many of the guides to recognizing abuse are gendered with a female survivor and a male perpetrator, rendering abuse of men invisible. Many shelters do not provide services to male survivors (although some female-only shelters will put male survivors up in hotels).

Most men will never end up in prison, a majority will never be raped or abused, but the same societal expectations that allow us to laugh off the rape and abuse of men give rise to a thousand smaller micro-aggressions, all the little ways in which men are made to feel horrible in a gendered way. It sounds strange to say that the same system tells men that they are grotesque and laughable for being masculine, and simultaneously pathetic and laughable for not being masculine enough, but bizarrely, that is the case.

Of course, a few men do manage to perform hegemonic masculinity quite well and even avoid most of the negative consequences of masculinity.

Read the whole article.

Chris Hedges - War Is Betrayal: Persistent Myths of Combat

As far as I know, there has not been a formal declaration of war in my lifetime (since 1967). Still, various presidents have sent our military around the planet in a variety of combat missions, most recently to Afghanistan and Iraq. There also has not been a mandatory draft in my lifetime, which has resulted in a military composed of the patriotic (an act of service to the nation) and the poor (those who join to learn a skill or earn money for college, or simply to escape a life of flipping hamburgers).

According to Chris Hedges, in a new article for the Boston Review, the reality is even more harsh:

We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites. 

I doubt that Hedges identifies himself with the term, but I'm willing to bet he has been named a Marxist by the rich, mostly-white "ruling class" he so often targets in his articles and books. For him, this is a nation of social class built on wealth and power - the rich (the proverbial 1%) vs. the rest of us.

The poor are those who do the hardest most dangerous work, and that includes military service - of the 25 most dangerous jobs, 99% of those doing them are men, and of those men, my guess is that a fair percentage are from low-income families and from minority families. And now, even women are beginning to enter these fields (especially military service).

Here is some more from Hedge's article, War Is Betrayal: Persistent Myths of Combat:

At the age of ten I was given a scholarship to a top New England boarding school. I spent my adolescence in the schizophrenic embrace of the wealthy, on the playing fields and in the dorms and classrooms that condition boys and girls for privilege, and came back to my working-class relations in the depressed former mill towns in Maine. I traveled between two universes: one where everyone got chance after chance after chance, where connections and money and influence almost guaranteed that you would not fail; the other where no one ever got a second try. I learned at an early age that when the poor fall no one picks them up, while the rich stumble and trip their way to the top.

Those I knew in prep school did not seek out the military and were not sought by it. But in the impoverished enclaves of central Maine, where I had relatives living in trailers, nearly everyone was a veteran. My grandfather. My uncles. My cousins. My second cousins. They were all in the military. Some of them—including my Uncle Morris, who fought in the infantry in the South Pacific during World War II—were destroyed by the war. Uncle Morris drank himself to death in his trailer. He sold the hunting rifle my grandfather had given to me to buy booze.

He was not alone. After World War II, thousands of families struggled with broken men who, because they could never read the approved lines from the patriotic script, had been discarded. They were not trotted out for red-white-and-blue love fests on the Fourth of July or Veterans Day.

The myth of war held fast, despite the deep bitterness of my grandmother—who acidly denounced what war had done to her only son—and of others like her. The myth held because it was all the soldiers and their families had. Even those who knew it to be a lie—and I think most did—were loath to give up the fleeting moments of recognition, the only times in their lives they were told they were worth something.

“For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’” Rudyard Kipling wrote. “But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot.”

Any story of war is a story of elites preying on the weak, the gullible, the marginal, the poor. I do not know of a single member of my graduating prep school class who went into the military. You could not say this about the high school class that graduated the same year in Mechanic Falls, Maine.

This was true, in its own way, in my own high school.

Only none of us were wealthy. The only true wealth in rural Southern Oregon was intelligence and hard work, our ticket to college. For others, especially the young men, it was a life in the timber mills (a life that dried up not long after we graduated) or spend a few years in the military to earn money for college or learn a trade.

Hedges can be prone to more than a little hyperbole, but this article is pretty spot on. Read the whole thing.

But before you go read the article (and I hope you do), here is one last passage that gets the point across in case you choose not to click through:

War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans; calls for sacrifice, honor, and heroism; and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. From a distance it seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a bit part in the great drama of history. It promises to give us identities as warriors, patriots, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion, and pain. Human decency and tenderness are crushed, and people become objects to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naïvely blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, becomes stark. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It might let us see, although the cost is tremendous.

How Resilient Are You? A Short Assessment

Lifehack posted a simple self-test to assess our resilience.The topic of resilience has become very relevant in recent years as a result of the constant stress so many of us deal with in our lives. Wikipedia offers a nice description of psychological resilience - and it's important to understand that psychological resilience supports physical resilience and likewise, physical health and resilience supports psychological resilience.

Resilience in psychology refers to the idea of an individual's tendency to cope with stress and adversity. This coping may result in the individual "bouncing back" to a previous state of normal functioning, or using the experience of exposure to adversity to produce a "steeling effect" and function better than expected (much like an inoculation gives one the capacity to cope well with future exposure to disease).[1] Resilience is most commonly understood as a process, and not a trait of an individual.

___

[R]esilience is best understood as a process. It is often mistakenly assumed to be a trait of the individual, an idea more typically referred to as "resiliency".[12] Most research now shows that resilience is the result of individuals being able to interact with their environments and the processes that either promote well-being or protect them against the overwhelming influence of risk factors.[13] These processes can be individual coping strategies, or may be helped along by good families, schools, communities, and social policies that make resilience more likely to occur.[14] In this sense "resilience" occurs when there are cumulative "protective factors". These factors are likely to play a more and more important role the greater the individual’s exposure to cumulative "risk factors". The phrase "risk and resilience"' in this area of study is quite common.

Commonly used terms, which are closely related within psychology, are "psychological resilience", "emotional resilience", "hardiness", "resourcefulness", and "mental toughness". The earlier focus on individual capacity which Anthony[15] described as the "invulnerable child" has evolved into a more multilevel ecological perspective that builds on theory developed by Uri Bronfenbrenner (1979), and more recently discussed in the work of Michael Ungar (2004, 2008), Ann Masten (2001), and Michael Rutter (1987, 2008). The focus in research has shifted from "protective factors" toward protective "processes"; trying to understand how different factors are involved in both promoting well-being and protecting against risk.

With that background, here is the quiz.

How Resilient Are You? Take the Test!

July 8 by Bobbi Emel
When faced with a crisis, some of us bounce back just like a fully inflated ball while others of us hit the ground with a thud and stay there, totally deflated.

How good are you at bouncing back? Just how resilient are you?

Take this test* to get your answer!

To get a good idea of how resilient you are, be as honest as possible when taking the test!

For each item, fill in the blank at the end of the item using the following scale:

1 = Absolutely disagree
2 = Disagree
3 = Neutral
4 = Agree
5 = Absolutely agree

1. When confronted with a crisis, I usually start working on a solution right away rather than first just hoping it will go away. _____
2. I don’t worry too much about the future. _____
3. I am not embarrassed to tell my friends and family when something bad has happened to me. _____
4. Every time a crisis occurs, I can easily remember that I’ve made it through bad things before. _____
5. When something bad happens in my life, I don’t spend a lot of time wishing I had done something differently or thinking constantly about the bad thing. ____
6. I often think about what I’ve learned from a crisis after it’s passed. _____
7. When I get stuck in traffic and am going to be late for an appointment, I am very calm rather than frustrated and stressed. _____
8. I write a gratitude list at least once a week about the things I’m grateful for. _____
9. When something bad happens, I prefer to be around others rather than withdrawing and being by myself. _____
10. I’m not very hard on myself most of the time. _____
11.  I think it’s okay to occasionally smile and laugh when something really bad has happened. _____
12. I have a go-to person – like a mentor – when a crisis occurs in my life. _____
13. I don’t tend to get stuck in the past. _____
14. It’s easy for me to believe that a crisis or catastrophe in my life can be a good thing. _____
15. When a crisis happens, I come up with a lot of different solutions rather than just freezing. _____

Now total up your score!

Scoring:

60-75     You’re a superball! You have very good resiliency skills and habits and you can bounce back from just about anything.
45-59     You are bouncing right along  . . . most of the time. You have good resiliency skills, although sometimes it’s hard to engage them right away when faced with a crisis.
30-44     Meh. Your ball has gone a little flat. You need to pump more air into that ball. Crises tend to throw you a bit. Add some flexibility to your life and be open to handling problems differently in the future.
15-29     Uh-oh. Your ball is completely flat. Looks like you need to really work on your resiliency skills. Check out the section below for more ideas. And don’t worry: learning to bounce back in life is like learning anything else – you just need to practice. Be open to responding to setbacks in a different way than you have in the past.

Detailed breakout:

Here are the components of resiliency that made up your scores. If you were low in one particular area, try to increase that particular skill.

Acceptance: the art of non-resistance
Items 1, 5, 7, 11

If you scored yourself a 1, 2, or even a 3 on these items, realize that denial is a common response to adversity and is actually a protective mechanism. Just don’t stay in it too long or you won’t bounce back at all! Teach yourself to see the reality of your situation and act on that.

Also consider how much energy you are expending when you fight or resist your problem. You can give in without giving up. The difference is that giving in allows you to keep trying to solve the problem without using up precious energy resisting the fact that the problem is here. It’s here in front of you. Don’t resist it – accept its presence and work on it!

Remember that it’s okay to experience positive emotions and laugh even when in the midst of a crisis. This kind of emotional experience will help release oxytocin and endorphins that you need to help you through the storm.

Perspective: see things clearly and from different angles
Items 4, 15

The key to this component is to remember that you have had difficult times before and made it through. Remember your past experience!

Also, keep in mind that there are many angles to a problem and therefore many solutions. Break out of your old mold and try something new! A great way to prep yourself for future difficulties is to develop your creativity. Try Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head for some fun, mind-expanding activities and ideas.

Social Support: ya gotta have friends
Items 3, 9, and 12

There is a lot of research showing that social support is a main component of resiliency. Even if you’re an introvert, having just one person you trust to talk with about your situation can be extremely helpful.

It’s also really good to have a more experienced, wiser person or mentor you can turn to when trouble hits. This can be a parent, friend, or anyone you look up to and respect.

Positive Actions: creating positive emotions during times of crisis
Items 2, 8, 10, 13

As mentioned above, it’s important to experience positive emotions in your life, even in times of crisis. Researcher Barbara Fredrickson’s work shows that positive emotions not only help you feel good, but they expand your ability to problem-solve well.

Rather than worrying about the past or future, try to stay in the present as much as possible. Listen to some mindfulness meditations to help you remain centered in the current moment.

Be kind to yourself! Even if you got yourself into a mess, remember that everyone else has at some time in their lives, too. Treat yourself as you would your best friend who is having problems.

Finding the gifts/Learning the lessons
Items 6, 14

Adversity frequently brings opportunities for self-growth and new experiences. Even though you would rather not have problems, remember the old saying: The sand that irritates the oyster often becomes a pearl.

Well? How resilient are you? Let’s hear about it in the comments below!

*This is a non-scientific test used for informational purposes only.