Break the inheitred [wounds + unawareness] cycle!
12 Projects toward high-nurturance family relationships

How You Can Help Prevent
Family Stress and Divorce

p. 3 of 4

By Peter K. Gerlach, MSW

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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 People Pleaser, Shamed Child, Skeptic, Inner Critic, Anxious Child, and Guilty Child...

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 knowledge test, including topics like those above. (Notice your subselves' reaction). Option: require all marrying and/or divorcing couples to assess 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 Higher Power 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 Break the Cycle! 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.

        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.

        You really can make a difference, and enjoy a deeply-satisfying, celebratory conversation with your future self!

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If You're a Human-service Professional...

       This section is for you if you're in (or considering) one of these professions: 
 

  • clergy

  • community organization

  • consulting

  • coaching, counseling, or therapy

  • 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

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..

 

     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.

        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 Moralizer, Perfectionist, Inner Critic, People-pleaser, Idealist, and/or Guilty Child 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 integrity 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 true Selves and a strong spiritual belief. Whether you alert other people to this toxic [wounds + ignorance] cycle (or parts of it) or not will ultimately be decided by the subselves who control your personality. Do you know who they are yet? Are you clear on your life purpose 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 true Self answering this?

        The prior two pages suggest that if you want to help prevent family stress and divorce, commit to these three steps:

  • Increase your conceptual knowledge by studying six or seven vital topics.

  • high-nurturance relationships and families, and effective co-parenting  

  • personality subselves, psychological wounds, and wound-recovery

  • the [wounds + unawareness] cycle that is spreading and degrading our culture

  • effective-communication and problem-solving basics and skills

  • healthy grieving basics, and how to spot and free blocked mourning;

  • divorce phases and recovery, and if apprpriate...

  • stepfamily basics, realities, hazards, and safeguards. 

You probably don't know what more you need to know about these. To discover what you need to learn try these self-assessment quizzes.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 wounded, unaware, and uninformed - and don't (want to) know this, or deny or minimize it. We unconsciously choose and endure work in organizations that replicate low-nurturance conditions in our early childhood; and our protective false selves will deny, minimize, or justify this and resist changing it. (A  D  ?)

Implication: if you're significantly wounded, your dominant subselves will probably resist the ideas in this prevention series. Notice your self-talk now...

        Many people who train, certify, license, hire, supervise, fund, and evaluate human-service professionals and programs are also significantly-wounded survivors of low-nurturance childhoods. Most of them are unaware of that, what it means, 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 wounds + personal unawareness + 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 changing 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] cycle 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 survivors of early-childhood neglect will (a) fiercely deny their host person is wounded and unaware; or (b) they will agree, and then creatively avoid making core-attitude changes 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 primary needs   (discomforts) + primary beliefs and values + life experience, rather than by theories, arguments, lectures, or logic. Current primary needs are determined by which personality subselves 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  identify, 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 true Self (capital "S") is guiding 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 personality and (b) a true Self and false self to an average early-teen. (T  F  ?)

I can name at least five traits that indicate a true Self is in charge of an adult or child now. (T  F  ?)

I can name (a) the six false-self wounds that many people don't know they have, and (b) at least four of six major effects of these wounds. (T  F  ?)

I have assessed myself for these wounds honestly, and have evaluated my own need for personal recovery 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 nurturance level 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 six vital subjects that most Americans are unaware of now, and I have thoughtfully quizzed 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 pass down 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 self talk. 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...

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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