Values and Health
As I promised I'm going to do my first installment of blogging about the Baha'i Association of Mental Health Professionals annual conference. This year's conference is called, Human Spirit and the Social World. The focus of the sessions this morning was Values and Health and featured Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, and Jack Guillebeaux who is an international known diversity trainer and educator. Both presentations were remarkable in their own way. Dr. Marquardt, who is herself and adult child of divorce offered a mixture of both data and narrative to dramatize that people have not payed sufficient attention to the spiritual and moral impact of divorce on the inner lives of children. One of the things she helped us to understand is that there is no such thing as a "good divorce" when you consider the experience of the child who has to navigate the two worlds that now exist between their parents and make sense of what that means, often with no support from the adults in their lives. I'll include my notes later tonight, but I just wanted to give you a taste. Jack Guillebeaux had a very engaging style of talking with us and there was much humor. He did a masterful job of discussing the role of mental health professionals in the context of the effort of the Baha'i community to embrace new members, while attending to the spiritual and psychological needs of current members. He reminded us that our training provides us with specific tools that can be used to address the psychospiritual challenges that block many Baha'is from living the kinds of lives they would prefer. I have to run and eat and get ready for chairing the next session which is about Cross-Cultural Paradigms of Health.
6 comments:
Tell Jack I said hey we both served on the Montgomery LSA before he went on to the "Big Time"
Terry..
Give my gretings to my RUHI cocollaborators Connie and Allison (tutor).
Enjoy!!!
Ayesha
What you all are doing is so important. I think of so many black folks I've known who've gone to therapy but have come to the conclusion that their therapist is a clueless racist and so they stop going. And then there's the folks who refuse to go because they feel the therapist is going to tell them some morally ambiguous mess that doesn't jibe with being a Baha'i. Or the therapist tells them that being a Baha'i is part of their problem because they're repressing some aspect of themselves.
Looking forward to hearing more.
Phillipe,
I was going to comment on your post the other day, but I found that I couldn't. I was having a strong emotional reaction to something, and I couldn't figure out what it was. After a couple of days, I can finally identify what I'm feeling. I'm defensive.
Why would I be defensive? It has to do with Ms. Elizabeth Marquardt and her work about the trauma of divorce. I'm not a child of divorce, but I can certainly tell you what it's like to live in a home with parents who are constantly at war with each other. And I can also tell you that life became better for me, and probably for my children after I divorced their extremely violent, drug addicted father. In my case, would Ms. Marquardt advise a woman in my situation to STAY with a man like that, for the sake of the children?
Perhaps the answer is for us to learn better ways to choose and live with our marriage partners so that we wouldn't have to go through the pain of divorce in the first place.
Liz, I hear what you're saying about therapy. I've struggled with it for the exact same reasons. But in the long run, it helped me especially since I adopted the attitude of "take what I need and leave the rest." In my opinion, our world needs more therapists who are Baha'is and therapists who are either familiar with or sensitive to Black culture, attitudes and thoughts. Now that I think about it, that's asking a lot of those folks, isn't it? Is there any such training available?
Angela, I'd encourage you to read her book and make up your own mind about what she is saying, which is really just sharing the experiences of the children of divorce. I also agree that we need more therapists of all backgrounds who are sensitive to the "grievous and slow healing wounds" that black Americans have experienced. Well meaning people are doing great harm simply due to their ignorance and this needs to change. I include myself in that category, though I am trying to become more effective. Our society prepares few of us, whether mental health professionals or not to be effectives healers of one another so it is not anyone's fault so to speak. We have become mindful of these things and work consciously to transform ourselves and society. This is what I'm trying to do in my own way. I think that you and Liz are also making similar efforts.
I hear you, Angela.
First, let me say Ms Marquardt did explicitly state she was not speaking about women who need to leave abusive and/or violent relationships, rather about women who simply felt it was time to "move on". She was concerned that society, and social scientists, in this day and age seem to say that the "good divorce" is OK, without considering the emotional, moral and spiritual toll divorce can take on children. She was speaking about people so caught up in "personal fulfillment" that they don't deeply consider their responsibilites to their kids --
Although I found merit both in the concept, and in her willingness to put it out there, I am also keenly aware that there is another story, often unheard, that needs to be told.
The previous stable marriages Ms. Marquardt referenced were, I guessed, largely middle class Protestant American families in a limited portion of the 20th century. I don't think the institution was all that stable with the very wealthy, the poor, the immigrant, and especially with the African American family, which was systematically and purposefully destroyed from the time Africans first set unwilling foot on these shores. It's truly a miracle that family life has survived under these conditions.
As a mom, I understand feeling defensive going anywhere near the suggestion of anything we may have done to damage our children, who are at the very core of our hearts. And I don't know you or the details of your life, but I would bet money (if gambling was OK) that your story is heroic, and that you've inspired others, including your children, as well
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