![Break the inheitred [wounds + unawareness] cycle!](../art/hdr-cycle.gif) |
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toward high-nurturance family relationships |
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How You Can Help
Prevent
Family Stress and Divorce
p. 3 of 4 By
Peter K. Gerlach, MSW |
 The Web address of this
4-page article is http://sfhelp.org/prevent/intro..htm
Act on your vision, continued...
Satisfaction Options
Are
you clear enough yet on your personal rights
as a rare, unique person of dignity and worth? Option: have your true
Self encourage any reluctant subselves to "
follow your bliss"
the way that
you
are most comfortable with, not someone else. Expect stiff resistance from
normal personality subselves like your
and
Create
and submit an article, a poem, a novel, or an artwork about the topics
above and your vision; design and sell a line of T-shirts; start a
greeting-card company, or contribute to one;
Bring your topics up with your
friends, and learn from their reactions. Enlist like-minded companions;
Call someone who controls
communication. policy, and/or education in your target group (e.g. an
editor, clergyperson, teacher, or human-resource chairperson), and ask
for an appointment;
Learn who sponsors community
education in your area and give a class - e.g. "Is your
true Self running your life - or is someone else in charge?",
and "What are your kids learning from you about 'good grief'?"
Publish your class, and train others to give it. Put it on a CD and/or
video and audio tapes, and submit it to educational clearing houses or
sell it
over the Web;
Identify existing commercial or
non-profit groups that work for your target population, and learn how
they communicate with their audiences and how to join them;
Learn how laws are made in your state
(or policies in your workplace), and manifest your vision by lobbying
for a new law or policy - e.g. lobby for a law that all people applying
for a marriage license have to pass a
including topics like those above. (Notice your subselves' reaction).
Option:
require all marrying and/or
divorcing couples to
for false-self wounds, communication competence, and/or the ability to
grieve well.
Learn the curriculums of the schools
in your community, and work to upgrade them as needed to include any of
the topics above that you feel passionate about;
Join a local speaker's group; and/or
ask local civic, church, or professional groups to let you speak
on one or more of these topics;
Ask your
and/or hire a consultant to help you manifest your vision;
Become a consultant for others
helping your target group;
Take
education courses for credit to strengthen your credentials and
credibility, and expand your knowledge on your selected topic/s;
Submit
a grant proposal to a funding source to help finance bringing your
vision to life;
Design a board and/or electronic game
to teach and inspire your target group. Examples: the
Ungame and Life Stories;
Create a
Web site,
community, and/or publish a
newsletter;...
Tell others about selected articles
in this
Web site, or the whole
site
, or these guidebooks, and/or
these resources; and/or...
Tell human-service professionals in
your target area about these divorce-prevention
suggestions and urge them to act.
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These illustrate a fraction of the ways you can earn major
satisfaction by helping living and future families and other groups
reduce their stress, raise their nurturance level, and lower their
chance of illness, unchosen losses, and psychological and legal
divorce.
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You really can
make a difference, and enjoy a deeply-satisfying, celebratory
conversation with your future self!
+ + +
If You're a Human-service Professional...
This section is for you if you're in (or considering) one of these
professions:
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-
family mediation
-
education -
all levels
-
social work
and
social casework
-
human
resources
-
judges,
attorneys, and law enforcement
|
-
legislators
-
medicine
(applied)
-
military
-
personal
motivation
-
personal
trainer
-
public media
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It's also written to you if you train, supervise,
and/or evaluate such professionals; or you are a human-service program director, funder, evaluator,
and/or consultant,
This article is based on this premise..
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As a human-service professional,
you have the moral obligation and the
opportunity to...
learn and teach the people you serve some or all
of the seven topics below, and to...
motivate them to study and apply the
topics, and teach them to their kids.
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Do you
agree with this? Here's some perspective on this proposal:
Is Stress Prevention Your Ethical Responsibility?
Who defines your main
responsibilities and ethical/moral standards as a human-service
professional? Your grad-school instructors? Your
supervisor? Your employer? Your professional association/s and/or licensing
organization? Local or national
laws? You parents? Your conscience (e.g. your
and/or
subselves)? All of the above?
The people who
have shaped your professional conduct
probably weren't aware of what you're reading here. If so,
they probably wouldn't expect or urge you to work at
preventing our [wounding + ignorance] cycle, even if they understood and
accepted it. If that's your
situation, then you face an inescapable ethical question: will you permit other people
to determine your professional priorities and goals, or will you follow your
own
and conscience?
If you accept that the [wounds +
unawareness] cycle is real, toxic, and widespread, are you morally
responsible to alert other people - specially parents and
future generations - to it, and how to avoid or break it? I propose
that this is no different than if you were among the first people to be aware of AIDS,
West Nile virus, or
the risk of cancer from nicotine and excessive exposure to ultra-violet rays.
Thruout
human history, altruistic people with unusual moral courage and conviction have
publicly proposed that prevailing beliefs, knowledge, customs, and laws were
wrong - e.g. Galileo, Darwin, Jane Addams, Abraham Lincoln, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Anthony, and Martin Luther King.
They chose to
endure public and professional scorn, jail, threats, exile, and even death
because of their challenging traditional social "truths" and values. They valued their integrity and humanitarian
values and vision more highly than social acceptance and approval,
and personal security and freedom.
I suspect that brave, determined, far-seeing people like these have been guided by
their
and a strong
belief. Whether you alert other
people to this toxic [wounds + ignorance] cycle (or parts of it) or not will ultimately be decided by the
who
control your personality. Do you know who they are yet? Are you clear on
your
yet? How do you want to feel about how you dealt with this
major ethical
choice when you're about to die? Option: learn about this from your wise
Future Self.
Pause and
reflect. What are you thinking and feeling: Boggled? Inspired? Curious?
Distracted? Cynical? Bored? Why did you start to read this article?
If you're not motivated to prevent part
or all of the [wounds + ignorance] cycle with
some group of people now, why not acknowledge that and stop reading? This
challenging mission is not for everyone...
Priority
check: get undistracted,
breathe well, and rate your current professional priorities honestly:
on a scale of one (my main
professional satisfaction comes fro helping people reduce current stress)
to five (my main professional
satisfaction comes from working to prevent average people from
having significant personal and family problems),
I rate myself as a ___. Would
you rather put out forest fires or prevent them if you could? Is your
answering this?
The prior
two pages suggest that if you want to help prevent family
stress and divorce, commit to these three steps:
You probably don't know what more you need to
know about these. To discover what you need to learn try these
self-assessment
Then...
-
Gain experiential knowledge by
tailoring and applying these topics to your
yourself and your family (pp.
1-2),
and your key social and professional relationships; Then...
-
Pick a target group that interest you,
starting with the people you serve. Choose from many options for using your
expanded knowledge to raise their awareness on some or all of these
seven essential
topics. Then act on your choice to
prevent the [wounds + ignorance]
cycle from harming future generations in your target group.
To expand your self-awareness, assess your position on these...
Premises
Even if
you're already committed to preventing family stress and divorce, thoughtfully
compare the premises below with your beliefs. They come from my 69 years on
Earth and 27 years clinical training, research, and private-practice and
classroom experience with members of over 1,000 typical troubled Midwestern families since
1979. A = "I agree," D = "I disagree, and ? = "I'm not
sure," or "It depends" (on what?)"
| Many
dedicated human-service
professionals like you and me are significantly
and
uninformed - and
don't (want to) know this, or deny or minimize it. We
unconsciously choose and endure work
in organizations that replicate
conditions in our early childhood; and our protective
will
or justify this
and resist changing it. (A D ?)
Implication:
if you're significantly wounded, your
dominant
will probably resist the ideas in this
prevention series. Notice your
now... |
Many people who train, certify, license, hire, supervise, fund, and
evaluate human-service professionals and programs are also
significantly-wounded
of low-nurturance childhoods.
Most of them are unaware of that, what it
and of the
cycle-prevention steps you're reading about here.
(A D ?)
No
matter what a client's or patient's presenting (surface) problems are, their underlying primary problems are some mix of
unseen false-self
+ personal
+ ignorance (lacking knowledge) of communication,
healthy grief, effective-relationship,
and effective co-parenting
basics.
(A D ?)
Implication: If this is true, then professional efforts that
don't aim to heal the wounds and increase their self-awareness and
knowledge of the topics above will be significantly less effective
than they could be, long term..
Reality check:
think of all the people you have served, and your many teachers and colleagues.
What percentage of them do you think fit this premise?
If a false self
controls you and/or
you lack knowledge of the topics above, you may
skip, discount, or underestimate this.
More core premises...
Most human-service
professionals, programs, and organizations focus on reacting to
(healing / reducing) personal and social problems, rather than preventing
them. This is partly true because prevention requires
traditional beliefs and norms, and most people (like you?) resist
doing that. Prevention also pays less than resolving
or curing existing problems, because the public demand for prevention is far
lower. (A D ?)
One symptom of our
unremarked, epidemic [wounding + unawareness]
is widespread
American divorce. Typical wounded,
uninformed, well-intentioned media and human-service professionals focus
on "the effects of (legal) divorce" and "healing troubled marriages"
not on preventing widespread false-self wounds + unawareness + our
national indifference to unwise marriage and child-conception choices and
unqualified child care. Restated: many or most human-service professionals focus
on reducing current symptoms, not the primary problems. (A D ?)
The
protective
false selves who govern
of early-childhood
will (a)
fiercely deny their host person is wounded and unaware; or (b) they will agree, and then
creatively avoid making core-attitude
to reduce the wounds and learn the seven topics above. They will (c) rigidly
rationalize and/or deny doing this, despite clear evidence of it.
(A D ?)
Implication: if this is true and you decide to help reduce our
relentlessly-expanding toxic [wounds +
unawareness] cycle, work to plant "awareness-seeds," rather than trying to save
the world by yourself. This wise 12-step
motto applies: "Progress,
not Perfection..."
Human
choices and
behaviors are more driven by current
(discomforts) + primary beliefs and values + life experience, rather than
by theories, arguments,
lectures, or logic. Current
are determined by which personality
govern a child or adult (e.g. you), and how those subselves perceive
and react to
current environmental conditions.
(A D ?)
Implication: your long-term satisfaction from
stress-prevention efforts will rise significantly if you
validate, and rank (a) your current primary needs and (b) those of your
clients, patients, students, and other target groups, and then help people learn
how to discern and fill these needs cooperatively. Does this describe your
professional goals and work recently?
Another
way to expand your self-awareness is to thoughtfully invest undistracted time in
this...
Knowledge Check...
Before
evaluating
your professional options for helping others prevent and reducing the toxic
effects of [wounds + unawareness] cycle, assess some selected knowledge. T = "true" or "I agree;"
F = "false" or "I disagree;" and ? = "I'm not sure, don't know,
or don't care."
I'm
sure my
(capital "S")
is
my personality now. (T F ?)
If you're not sure, your responses below may be distorted.
I can clearly describe the concepts of (a) a multi-part
and
(b) a
to an
average early-teen. (T F ?)
I can name at least five
that indicate a true Self
is in charge of an adult or child now. (T F ?)
I can name (a) the six
that many people don't know they have, and
(b) at least four
of six
of these wounds. (T
F ?)
I
have
myself for these wounds honestly,
and have evaluated my own need for personal
from them. (T F ?) If not, why not give priority to that as you help
others? "Promote yourself to equal."
I have honestly evaluated the
of (a) my childhood and current families and (b)
my workplace, and (c) can clearly describe what
the levels mean in my life. (T F ?)
I can name
that most Americans are unaware of now, and I have
thoughtfully
myself on each of them. (T F
?)
I have honestly
evaluated whether these wounds and
restricted or distorted knowledge of these topics significantly affect (a) me and (b)
my
family now. (T F ?)
I understand how false-self wounds and unawarenesses
the generations (like my
own descendents) and spread in our culture. (T F ?)
On a scale of 1 (no interest) to 5 (very
interested), my motivation to reduce the wounds and unawareness in our family
now is a ___.
I
agree that false-self wounds and unawareness cause many serious personal,
family, and social problems for average people like those I serve
professionally and work with. (T F ?)
On a scale of 1 (no interest) to 5 (very
interested), my motivation to help (a) the people I serve professionally
and/or (b) my co-workers to
understand this [wounds + ignorance] scourge and its effects is a ___.
Note your
thoughts and and emotions now - your
It's caused by your busy subselves reacting to what you just
experienced. What did you just learn about yourself and your profession?
Reflect
again on why you began reading this article. Decide if you need a stretch break.
Then...
+ + +
 Continue
with a knowledge check, and then review of specific options to suit
your special professional interest and occupation...
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Updated
September 05, 2008
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