And are willing to help out parents of young children who are being run ragged between working and parenting, with little or no support from grandparents because those individulas do not live locally?

Think of the health benefits: the sense of continuing to be worthwhile in one's life by building a relationship with great children.  They'll love you; you'll love them.  Your health will improve.  The health of the parents will improve.  The children will be better off with more people who love them in their lives.  It's potentially a win-win-win solution....

.....so why isn't this happening?  Or if it is, please tell me because I am unaware.

Looking for enlightened volunteer grandparents in the Vancouver/Burnaby/North Van/West Van area...

I have learned something important, i think, in the last couple of months of my life.  I experienced a healing related a traumatic loss that I had basically forgotten about -- until the healing occurred.

The traumatic episode was an interpersonal career-related one: I had a very unfortunate experience in a practicum in education in 1997, that left me believing that elementary schools were not the place for me to work, and that children  were not the age group of people I ought to be working with. 

I'll spare the details here, other than that they involved a power laden encounter with two supervisors in a rather small, dark room that left me feeling shamed and quite utterly disempowered.

Remember: shame is the experience of shrinking...

But here is the healing, occurring 10 years later.  Having spent a year at home half-time looking after my spectacularly wonderful daughters, ages 4 and 2 (entirely an objective assessment of them :), I felt renewed confidence and interest in working with little beings.  So an opportunity presents itself to work in an elementary school as a counsellor and I take it.  I meet an inspiring principal and a district counsellor who head up this inner-city school employing a community-development approach called "project hope", and a psychologically-informed approach based on attachment theory. 

I take this half-time job at this school, and experience a sense of engagement in my work more profound and clear than I can remember in a long, long time.  If I go to work feeling grumpy, I now often find my spirits lifting over the course of the day, even though I may be dealing with very challenging situations, like kids experiencing suicidal ideation, and the like.

Weird, huh!?

Friggin awesome, actually.

So this experience has revitalized my clinical focus, and sharpened my research focus in my career:  I really like working with kids and families.  And addressing trauma, including attachment related interpersonal trauma is emerging as being increasingly central to both my clinical and research work.

The take-away lesson: we ought not to underestimate the significance of traumatic experiences on our lives: these experiences can push our lives off-course.  At the same time, given that the universe seems to operate according to both karma and creativity, it is never too late.  If we stay focused on our healing and development, which always includes our role in the healing and development of others, good things may happen when we least expect it.

That has been my experience.

 

The gift of authentic power: Towards an Integral masculinity for the 21^st century

What we need going forward as men is neither a myth of male power nor of male powerlessness, but a living context in which men recognize and enact authentic power. 

Mythic consciousness was patriarchal.  Empowered by the sky god myth, men enjoyed (but also suffered under) instrumental power over others - over other men, women and children in the economic and political spheres.  Men's dominance in the socio-political sphere (but also vulnerability to other men higher in the hierarchy), was balanced by being tasked with the role of protector and provider for women and children.  Yes, men had primary economic power, and, yes, they were expected to use that power for the benefit of the women and children under their care. 

Modern consciousness, first and foremost, is about objectivity.  And therefore, a free-functioning market economy will basically reward people with their market value, whether they are male or female.  Warren Farrell has done much work to dispel the notion that men are paid more for the same work as women.  As he points out, no corporation in its right mind would hire men should that corporation have to pay those men more for the same amount of work.  Put another way, corporations would be smart and would hire all women to work for them, since they would have to pay them less for the same work.  We don't see this happen.  What we do see is corporations abroad hiring men and women from marginalized ethnic groups at low wages.  Again, modern feminists do the legitimate victims a profound disservice when they propose that the modern North American woman is somehow being treated in a manner analogous to those men, women and children from 3^rd world countries.

In the relational sphere of couples and families, modern consciousness also introduced the notion of equality.  Thus, modern consciousness sows the seeds of freedom for men from domination by their role of protector and provider role.  Likewise, women are at least partly freed from being dominated by their roles of nurturer of the young and keeper of the home.

However, to the degree that it fosters an extreme objectivity, a dissociated objectivity, we could make a case that modern consciousness as it has developed in the West has injured feminine ways of knowing, which might be characterized as interior: both subjective and intersubjective.  Radical corporatism injures both men and women in terms of their interior and relational lives.

Postmodern consciousness, at least as it has developed in North America, is about subjectivity - the individual's perspective is highly valued -- and intersubjectivity: relationship is highly valued.  Objectivity is often denounced, or at least is seen as highly relative in importance in comparison to subjectivity and particularly intersubjectivity.  In terms of gender relations, in the postmodern world we see a swing towards the predominance of feminine ways of knowing and being in the world.  On the positive side, we see an increased honoring of intuition and other interior modes of knowing such as contemplation and meditation.  Likewise, an honoring of connection and relationship.  On the negative side, with extreme postmodernism, instrumental modes of being come to be seen as inherently problematic.  Since many men's biology orients them towards an instrumental mode of being (we might say "power over objects" or I-It relationships), many men have suffered greatly from the influence of postmodern feminism.  Since postmodern feminism has been particularly dominant in academia, we see the exiting and disappearance of  men from that sphere. 

The birth of integral consciousness allows us to actually see the pattern just described.  Prior to integral consciousness, evolutionary patterns are not really perceived.  It's as if they don't exist.  But with integral consciousness, the prior evolutionary pattern comes to be perceived, and then in active mode, integral consciousness seeks to weave together the various threads, mythic, modern and postmodern; masculine and feminine. 

In her excellent article, "Beauty and the expansion of women's identity", Vanessa Fisher unpacks a developmental history of beauty and looks to help build a path to the future for women.  Inspired by her work, and Ken Wilber's insights, I believe we need likewise for men a developmental history of power, that in addition to providing such a history, provide suggestions for the way forward for men and boys, beyond postmodernism. 

 

Authenticity

What I want to write about this morning is the experience of authenticity I had a few days ago, as well as a general orientation I carry increasingly that being authentic is my most important value. 

Andrew Cohen has written and taught quite a bit about the Authentic Self.  The authentic self is related to a particular state experience of a self at a particular stage, and his use of the term arises out of a specific paradigm or injunction - enlightened communication - that is used in his community.  Therefore, I don't want to assume that my use of the term means the same thing as does his use of the term.

That said, I certainly have had some experiences of states of authenticity that have been deeply meaningful to me, in particular because of the, well, self-authenticating nature of those experiences.  A few days ago I had one of these experiences. 

Can't rely on a state for our identity, however, because states come and go...so here is where there is a need for transcendence to a self beyond states - i.e. Witness consciousness or nondual identity. 

Last night I dreamt about being a member of Cohen's community.  There was some subtle luminosity present in the dream, because I feel some resistance to that luminosity right now in the waking state.

The dream was also full of fear of cults.  Wacky things were going on in the dream - my life was in danger at a couple of points from Cohen's folks who were "hunting me down".

I grew up in an intensive communal environment, which could explain the source of such fears. 

Time to go move my body...

 

Integral Praxis of Time

I've been thinking lately about what an integral approach to the topic of time management might look like.  Because in a career counselling or career coaching context, time management is a practical and important topic.  But as far as I can tell, time management -even the term - tends to evoke a rationalist, "right-hand path" mindset, to use the integral term.  Working in a predominantly formal-operational mode, a person learns to prioritize tasks, chunk out various amounts of time to achieve those tasks, and so on.

I have admittedly not been very good at this for a while - it seems to me that I used to be rather better at time management - and I have had trouble figuring out why.  Well, I think part of the problem is that I have been trying to fit myself to a conception of time management that no longer works me, given my dynamic dialectical awareness of time.

With integral consciousness comes a sense that what is at least as important than time management, in its narrow sense, is timeliness.  A prominent writer in this area is Bill Torbert, who has developed much in the are of an integral approach to action inquiry in real time.  Within action inquiry in real time, I believe a person co-enacts a process dimension of time, which is what gives rise to the sense of evolution being much more than a scientific concept.  It becomes a felt sense or lived experience.  Time just feels like it is going somewhere important, and the individual wants to participate in that.  So, it seems to me that a pragmatic value or quality of active participation in the flow of time, as experienced dynamically, is that of timeliness.

Perhaps we could look for a synthesis of time-management and timeliness through the quadrant model, with timeliness being the experience felt in the UL, and appropriately managed clock time being organized in the UR.  And of course, the collective dimensions are important as well.  In particular, if a person with integral consciousness wants to have career satisfaction, he or she would be wise to look for an employer that organizes his or her business holocratically - or at the least, values the mutual co-arising of timeliness and time management.  Either that or work for oneself.  Since there are not many of these organizations out there yet, this means the latter option is going to be a more feasible one for many of us.

I have left out one really important aspect of an integral approach to time-management: not timeliness but timelessness.  An integral action inquiry needs to make contact with timelessness, or allow space for the sense of Witness consciousness to emerge - it is inevitably difficult to write about something that is experiencing the writing, not an object of it! 

For this aspect, I think one of Andrew Cohen's recent teachings is helpful.  I have been quite critical in the past of shadow aspects in Cohen's teaching and interpersonal relationships, and I remain wary of the seeming lack of attention paid to psychodynamic issues in his work and in his community.  I have submitted to them several times my interesting in seeing an issue of WIE devoted to integral psychotherapy and coaching. That said, I find his recent teaching on spiritual inquiry to be very illuminating.  In particular, I appreciate his emphasis on a practice of spiritual inquiry that balances allowing oneself to "not already know", on the one hand, and to "want to know" on the other.  In Cohen's own words, "not already knowing, at the deepest level, aligns us with the ground of all being, that primordial emptiness, inherently free and already liberated, that is the Self as unmanifest consciousness.  Wanting to know, passionately, energetically wanting to understand, aligns us simultaneously with the Authentic Self, which is the evolutionary impulse of deepest manifest expression of consciousness.  So the perfect evolutionary posture is one that is dynamically poised between those two opposites."

These are some initial thoughts on a topic that I think is of great interest and importance to integrally-oriented folks interested in feeling engaged and satisfied in their work-life, or really any time in their lives where action is required!

The following is very much a rough draft, but I haven't posted in a while so I thought I would put it out there.

What I want to write about this morning is what is the role and place of psychotherapy in a post postmodern context.

Presumably, there will be some role for psychotherapy in the post-postmodern world.  Psychotherapy is most generically defined as the intentional activity of one person attempting to improve the well-being of another person, through a deliberate process of some type of interpersonal engagement. 

At present, it seems that in the WIE worldview, there is no legitimate place for any kind of therapy.  I haven't heard this outright, but neither have I seen any attention given to therapy in the pages of the magazine.

Contrast this with AQAL journal, at present the lead publication of I-I, and you see nearly the opposite case: psychotherapy, followed closely by education, has received the most treatment. 

What is going on here?

My opinion is that WIE folks - Andrew Cohen - has thrown the baby of psychotherapy out with its postmodern bathwater.  This is an unfortunate state of affairs - and yet, the profession of psychotherapy does carry some culpability for this.

Ken Wilber, in a recent conference call, spoke about how "regression had replaced repression" as the most significant psycho-cultural issue in North American culture, in recent years.  If true, this is a statement that psychotherapists need to pay very close attention to.  Because in most or many psychotherapy circles, I see how the focus remains largely on undoing repression.  This puts psychotherapy behind the growth curve of the culture at large - and more importantly, means that psychotherapy becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

It seems that the development of coaching is one way that psychotherapy has tried to make itself relevant for the post-postmodern context.  However, coaching is often criticized by depth psychotherapists for being shallow and - the worse of all sins for depth psychotherapists - "cognitive".

What then are the partial truths of coaching and depth psychotherapies, and how could they be brought together in an approach to psychotherapy that is relevant for the challenges the culture faces, where regression has replaced repression as the most significant psycho-cultural issue?  This seems to me to be a relevant topic for our consideration.

This is from American Psychological Assocation website.

Child abuse rises when dad is at war

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER - August 01, 2007

Confirmed cases of child abuse and neglect in Army families substantially increase when one parent, usually the soldier father, is deployed to combat, according to a new Pentagon-funded report.

The study of nearly 1,800 families, including some at Fort Lewis, found that the rate of child maltreatment was 42 percent greater during deployments compared with times when soldiers were home.

Civilian mothers were nearly four times as likely to neglect their children than when their husbands were at home, and nearly twice as likely to physically abuse them, according to research appearing in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of American Medical Association.

What surprised researchers was "how strong the results were and how consistently they applied" to families regardless of socioeconomic status and other characteristics often linked to abuse and neglect, lead author Deborah Gibbs said Tuesday.

"It's not an isolated phenomenon," she said. "The evidence is pretty strong that combat-related deployments are responsible for the increase."

Officials at Fort Lewis and Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma gave general comments on the study Tuesday but referred further questions to the Pentagon.

"Families are placed on additional stress. The parent is deployed. You're going to have increased cases of neglect," said Lt. Col. Kris Peterson, chief of psychiatry at Madigan. "Some of that is intuitive. (But) military families are very resilient. They have income, medical resources, places to get help, so these things have been looked into."

Gibbs emphasized the problem was not rampant among Army families in which one parent was deployed and another was a civilian.

Her team's research of such families in which child maltreatment was substantiated found 3,334 incidents during the 40-month study. Ninety percent of the offenders maltreated their children on a single day during that time.

"It's safe to say that this is a small part of Army families with a soldier deployed," said Gibbs, a senior health analyst at the non-profit RTI International in Research Triangle Park, N.C. "Most Army families do a terrific job with coping with stresses that are tough to imagine."

Officials at Madigan and Fort Lewis listed an array of programs and services they provide to families to deal with stress before, during and after deployments.

The offerings include counseling and other mental health services, support networks, parenting classes, child care and fitness programs.

The Army also refers parents to off-base resources.

Madigan has preventative intervention programs for couples and families and social workers "designated to deal with soldiers and families on deployment-related issues," said Col. Samuel Mack, chief of social work.

The medical center has trained counselors in nearby school districts to help 150 to 200 children with acute needs related to bereavement and deployments, said David Callies, chief of children and family services.

To see more of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for online features, or to subscribe, go to http://seattlep-I.com.

??? 1998-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All Rights Reserved.

I don't know exactly what to say about this topic...I just know it is an important one and is one that I don't think I have ever read much about anywhere...the "old boy's club", btw, was not about this --  the old boys club was about particular groups of men bonding together to achieve protection and provision for "their" particular group of women and children --  and against other "old boys clubs" belonging to different companies, religions, countries.

I am not stressing heterosexuality to exclude homosexual men.  I am stressing heterosexuality to include heterosexual men.  For me it is a given that I, as a heterosexual man, ought to be compassionate towards homosexual men, as well as towards sexuals of any other kind.   

I just think that the idea of worldcentric compassion extended by heterosexual men to all other heterosexual men would be something of an evolutionary breakthrough...but what do you think?

Is this a discourse and/or praxis that anyone else knows about or has engaged in?  It would need to be at integral altitude to work, because at green altitude, men's compassion for other men is often blunted by their uncritical support for the shadow aspects of feminism (e.g. victim feminism, competitive feminism -- see Warren Farrell and Hoff-Summers for critiques of the shadow aspects of postmodern feminism).  Compassion at green is also compromised by being too wimpy...too much idiot compassion -- too much support, not enough challenge: e.g. idiot compassion won't work with terrorists and/or those with highly narcissistic and/or anti-social personalities in general...

It strikes me that we don't really have an integral men's discourse...we have bits and pieces...its scary territory because we certainly don't want to regress to "old boys club" mentality...but i think it is good to remember that the old boys club wasn't really about this....this would be something emergent...

Hurrah!  Whenever a stereotype falls to science, both sexes are better off!!! 

Study: Women Don't Talk More Than Guys
Associated Press - July 05, 2007
WASHINGTON - Another stereotype - chatty gals and taciturn guys - bites the dust.

Turns out, when you actually count the words, there isn't much difference between the sexes when it comes to talking.

A team led by Matthias R. Mehl, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, came up with the finding, which is published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The researchers placed microphones on 396 college students for periods ranging from two to 10 days, sampled their conversations and calculated how many words they used in the course of a day.

The score: Women, 16,215. Men, 15,669.

The difference: 546 words: "Not statistically significant," say the researchers.

"What's a 500-word difference, compared with the 45,000-word difference between the most and the least talkative persons" in the study, said Mehl. He said the least talkative person in the study - a male - used just over 500 words a day, while another male topped that by more than 45,000.

Co-author James W. Pennebaker, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Texas, said the researchers collected the recordings as part of a larger project to understand how people are affected when they talk about emotional experiences.

They were surprised when a magazine article asserted that women use an average of 20,000 words per day compared with 7,000 for men. If there had been that big a difference, he thought, they should have noticed it.

They found that the 20,000-7,000 figures have been used in popular books and magazines for years. But they couldn't find any research supporting them.

"Although many people believe the stereotypes of females as talkative and males as reticent, there is no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for extended periods of time," Pennebaker said.

Indeed, Mehl said, one study they found, done in workplaces, showed men talking more.

Still, the idea that women use nearly three times as many words a day as men has taken on the status of an "urban legend," he said.

"We realized we had the data," Mehl said in a telephone interview, so they went back to their recordings and calculated the actual numbers.

Their research began with one group of students in 1998, two groups sampled in 2001, two in 2003 and a final group in 2004. One of the 2003 groups involved 51 students in Mexico, the rest were all in the United States.

The students were fitted with unobtrusive recorders that sampled their conversations - the students didn't know when the recorders were on. From the samples, a total number of words for the day could be calculated.

Of the six groups sampled, women used more words than men in three and men used more words than women in the other three, including the one in Mexico.

The research was limited to college students, but Pennebaker said he believes it would probably apply to others in the same age range.

"The question is, how it applies to people as we get older," he said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Mehl said he thinks it should apply across age groups, but he wondered how it would be affected by different cultures.

Women Wield the Power in Marriage
Posted from: Psych Central Senior News Editor
on Friday, Jul, 6, 2007

Reviewed by: John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
on Friday, Jul, 6, 2007

The old adage of women being “the boss” around the home is true say researchers from Iowa State University. While men may still have more power in the workplace, wives are taking responsibilities and leadership in the home environment.

The study of 72 married couples from Iowa found that wives, on average, exhibit greater situational power — in the form of domineering and dominant behaviors — than their husbands during problem-solving discussions, regardless of who raised the topic.

All of the couples in the sample were relatively happy in their marriages, with none in counseling at the time of the study.

The paper titled “Sex Differences in the Use of Demand and Withdraw Behavior in Marriage: Examining the Social Structure Hypothesis,” appears in the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

Associate Professor of Psychology David Vogel and Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies Megan Murphy led the research.

“The study at least suggests that the marriage is a place where women can exert some power,” said Vogel.

“Whether or not it’s because of changing societal roles, we don’t know. But they are, at least, taking responsibility and power in these relationships. So at least for relatively satisfied couples, women are able to take some responsibility and are able to exert some power — but it’s hard for us to say why that’s so.”

“Women are responsible for overseeing the relationship — making sure the relationship runs, that everything gets done, and that everybody’s happy,” said Murphy, “And so, maybe some of that came out in our findings in terms of women domineering and dominating — that they were taking more responsibility for the relationship, regardless of whose topic was being discussed.”

As part of the study, each spouse was asked to independently complete a questionnaire on relationship satisfaction and an assessment of overall decision-making ability in the relationship. Each spouse also was asked to identify a problem in their relationship — an issue in which he or she desired the most change and which could not be resolved without the spouse’s cooperation.

Spouses were then asked to answer some questions about their chosen topics, including the type of problem-solving behaviors that generally take place when this topic arises, and the importance of the topic. Couples were then brought together and asked to discuss each of the problem topics for 10 minutes apiece — discussions that were videotaped. The researchers did not participate in the discussion.

“We actually just asked them to start talking about the issue, and then we left the room,” said Vogel. “And so they were all by themselves in the room talking. We were as non-obtrusive as possible. We just came back at the end of the period of time, and asked them to talk about the other topic.”

At the end of the discussions, couples were separated again. Each spouse was then debriefed and discussed his or her feelings and reactions to the study.

Vogel said that wives weren’t simply talking more than their husbands in discussions, but actually were drawing favorable responses from their husbands to what they said.

“That’s what I think was particularly interesting,” he said. “It wasn’t just that the women were bringing up issues that weren’t being responded to, but that the men were actually going along with what they said. They (women) were communicating more powerful messages and men were responding to those messages by agreeing or giving in.”

“There’s been research that suggests that’s a marker of a healthy marriage — that men accept influence from their wives,” said Murphy.

The study was funded, in part, by the National Institute of Mental Health, along with ISU.

Helpful article, but the tone of surprise annoys me: "men were actually going along with what they said"...sheesh: can see the "myth of male power" at play in the background here...also accepting influence (which comes from Gottman's pioneering research) is hopefully different from giving in to "domineering" and "dominating" behavior...I'd like to be able to accept influence, but I am not much interested in being dominated...