I have a psychotherapy practice in Madrid, but I often receive email requests for counseling from people in other parts of the world, since I also practice psychotherapy online, via Skype, in several languages: English, French, Italian and Russian. Alex’s email looked like spam, and I nearly deleted it. He wrote in an abrupt English, with neither a greeting nor a sign-off. When I read more closely, I saw that he was seeking therapy, though he didn’t say much else. In his brevity I sensed hesitation, a shade of doubt.
Some hide-and-seek is not unusual in the early phase of the therapy process. Asking for help involves a degree of exposure, which can trigger feelings of shame. For those who are wary about psychotherapy, the online format often appeals, as it avoids the physical, face-to-face confrontation of a classical consulting room and offers the option, or at least the illusion, of anonymity.
I wrote Alex back, asking if he might say a little more. Read more…
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
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A cognitive scientist and a German philosopher walk into the woods and come upon a tree in bloom: What does each one see? And why does it matter?
While that may sound like the set-up to a joke making the rounds at a philosophy conference, I pose it here sincerely, as a way to explore the implications of two distinct strains of thought — that of cognitive science and that of phenomenology, in particular, the thought of Martin Heidegger, who offers a most compelling vision of the ultimate significance of our being here, and what it means to be fully human.
When we feel that someone is really listening to us, we feel more alive, we feel our true selves coming to the surface — this is the sense in which worldly presence matters.
It can be argued that cognitive scientists tend to ignore the importance of what many consider to be essential features of human existence, preferring to see us as information processors rather than full-blooded human beings immersed in worlds of significance. In general, their intent is to explain human activity and life as we experience it on the basis of physical and physiological processes, the implicit assumption being that this is the domain of what is ultimately real. Since virtually everything that matters to us as human beings can be traced back to life as it is experienced, such thinking is bound to be unsettling. Read more…
Eight deer of various sizes are grazing the winter azaleas and fringe of monkey grass just outside the front window. Several young ruminants are right up next to the house, tugging at a tattered rhododendron, occasionally bumping the window screen. Although the dog is flipping out in the hallway below, barking sharply, indignantly, the herd is unfazed.
I’ve taken the dog out on her leash and rushed toward them, though her lunges and cries, like mine, only seem to amuse the deer before they reluctantly, elegantly and temporarily, move off.
Occasionally a doe looks up and gazes at me through the plate glass before blinking placidly and lowering her head to resume feeding. Behind this posse of four-legged bodies is a blinding stretch of snowy yard, where the car of one of my daughter’s friends is wedged into a gritty drift. On the back fender, splattered with road salt and slush, is a familiar bumper sticker: COEXIST.
Not long ago, it would have been rare to see one deer, let alone a whole drove of them, in the yard, especially in broad daylight. The road I live on in Albemarle County, Va., used to be an old dairy byway lined with large working farms and long stretches of woods. Several of the older houses still stand, one of them ours, built well over 100 years ago. At a curve in our road, just before the two-lane thoroughfare enters the city of Charlottesville, there is what I call a “Connecticut moment” — an 18th-century mill and creek on one side, an auto-body shop on the other.
Those former expanses of scrub and woodland meant that although we shared turf with the usual “suburban” fauna — squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons, an array of feeder birds — the larger wildlife creatures (bears, foxes, bobcats, deer) had their own, natural habitat. A neighbor down the road, a longtime resident, wryly recalls how he and his wife used to try to lure the shy deer out of the woods with salt licks in the winter months. Now, due in large part to the uprooting of long-established trees and the razing of farms and underbrush over the past decade to make way for ubiquitous townhouse developments with ironic names like Treesdale and Dunlora Forest, those of us who attempt to grow things in our yards spend a lot of time trying to keep the deer at bay.
My mother finally closed her eyes amid the grim bleats of the intensive care unit for a little sleep. I slipped my hand from hers and sat back. I picked up my phone to call my wife but saw it was 3 in the morning. I looked at emails, but didn’t really read them. Then I remembered something my mother had said a couple of hours before, as we knew our time together was winding down. It had made me smile; and now I sent out a tweet:
“Mother: I don’t know why this is going on so long. I’m late for everything I guess.”
I had flown across the country to join her in Chicago because my mother was 84 and in the hospital with some dark, undiagnosed splotch in her one good lung. Patricia Lyons Simon Newman Gelbin (three marriages produced what she called, with a practiced blush, “my railroad car of a name”) wasn’t a princess, a rock singer or a movie star. Instead she became something of a star on Twitter that summer two years ago, as I posted 140-character messages about what turned out to be the last days of her life. Read more…
On March 21, 1865, black Charlestonians reveled in their freedom in a parade that began before more than 10,000 people on the Citadel green and stretched for nearly two and a half miles.
Mounted marshals led a band, the 21st Regiment of the United States Colored Troops, and clergymen from numerous denominations. Behind them walked an assembly of women, more than 1,800 newly enrolled public school children and a variety of black tradesmen, from fishermen and carpenters to barbers and blacksmiths, who carried banners that read, among other things, “We Know No Master But Ourselves,” “Free Homes, Free Schools, One Country and One Flag” and “Our Reply to Slavery — Colored Volunteers.”
The march’s joy was not unmixed. According to a New York Daily Tribune correspondent, a horse-drawn cart followed the tradesmen, carrying an auctioneer’s block on which sat two black women and a child. Riding alongside them was a black man carrying a bell and waving the red flag that for decades had been the unmistakable sign of a slave trader open for business. Ringing his bell, the man called to spectators, “How much am I offered for this good cook?” “She is an ‘xlent cook, ge’men.” “She can make four kinds of mock-turtle soup—from beef, fish or fowls.” “Who bids?” Sixty men, tied together by a rope, walked behind the auction cart “in imitation of the gangs who used often to be led through these streets on their way from Virginia to the sugar-fields of Louisiana.” They were followed in turn by a hearse on which was chalked “Slavery is Dead,” “Who Owns Him? No One,” and “Sumter Dug His Grave on the 13th April 1861,” and by 50 women dressed entirely in black.
These elements of the parade were intended as a burlesque, as suggested by the “shouts of laughter” that met the hearse and the “joyous faces” of the women dressed as mourners. For some people, however, the charade triggered memories of the deepest trauma they ever experienced in their lives. “Old women burst into tears as they saw this tableau,” the Tribune reporter wrote, “and forgetting that it was a mimic scene, shouted wildly: ‘Give me back my children! Give me back my children!’” Read more…
Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
When Jack Dawley returned in 2007 to his hometown, Norwalk, Ohio, after eight years in prison and on parole in Wisconsin, he knew getting by would be difficult. He had a felony conviction and a history of past drug and alcohol abuse, although he’d been sober since 1999. He was unprepared for another obstacle, however: A few years later, he would keep landing in debtors’ prison.
Dawley did all right at first. For four years, he worked construction jobs and paid down the $1,400 in fines and court fees he owed the municipal court in Norwalk for domestic violence and D.U.I. convictions during his drunken years. But in 2012, he injured his back, lost his job and missed a payment on his court debt.
He was arrested and sentenced to jail for 10 days. When he got out, he had 90 days to make a payment. He failed, and went back to jail. A cycle was beginning: jail every 90 days.
Later in 2012, he took a job as a cashier. He was on his way to cash his first paycheck when he was pulled over and arrested, again for an infraction stemming from his debt. Back in jail, he missed eight days of work. When he got out, his job was gone. He stayed out of jail, but was homeless for the next two years.
Although the United States outlawed debtors’ prison two centuries ago, that, in effect, is where Dawley kept going. Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
This is the fifth installment of Going Off, a series of Anxiety posts chronicling the author’s attempt to wean off the medications she takes for depression, anxiety and insomnia.
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Last night at the karaoke place, I could tell that the bartender was happy. It has to be one of the worst service-industry jobs in Manhattan — listening to drunk people croon into microphones. But he was smiling without restraint. Because my friend and I constituted half of his customers and had belted out the last eight songs, he decided to take a turn. “You can’t hear my accent when I rap!” he told us as he geared up for “Forgot About Dre.” He was right. His Japanese accent vanished and he sounded like Dr. Dre, if Dr. Dre were a nice person instead of a violent one. His performance made everyone cheer. His happiness made everyone happy.
When I was taking 300 milligrams of bupropion, unpleasant memories registered as neutral; on 150 milligrams, I recall pain the old-fashioned way — I relive it.
I find myself cataloging the people around me as baseline happy or baseline depressed. Years ago, my mother (baseline happy) told me gently that she’d heard that “depression looks like a gray cloud.” That made me cry; I was touched by her effort to understand my pain, and disoriented by the reminder that some people aren’t depressed.
Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
We expected the baby in June, and our lease ended in July. Under the best of circumstances, I dread packing. To move is to endure a weekslong confrontation with your past selves and their poor consumer choices. You reckon with useless gifts retained from guilt, find birthday cards from the deceased. Now we were adding all that to the triage of newborn care.
Still, I couldn’t wait to leave Iowa and graduate school, and get back to New York. I’ve always depended on long walks to clear my head, but in Iowa City, the town limits were hastily arrived at, and beyond them lay only a monoculture of I-80 farmland, the indigenous grasses long ago plowed under. I looked across the white fields in winter and imagined this is what it would look like if you asked someone to paint their insomnia. Read more…
Griffin Stedman was 26 years old when he died from wounds suffered during the siege of Petersburg, Va., in August 1864. His monument on the field describes him as a “Typical Volunteer Soldier,” before noting a meteoric rise in the military: the Connecticut native and Trinity College graduate was commissioned as a captain in 1861, and died a brigadier general just three years later.
But Stedman is less famous for his career than the fortification named for him, and the climactic battle that occurred there: The Battle of Fort Stedman, the site of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s last chance to stave off defeat, which was fought on March 25, 1865. It is a site of particular importance to me, because Fort Stedman is where my great-grandfather became a hero, or a deserter. Maybe both.
By the spring of 1865, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had Lee cornered – and Lee knew it. Grant had Lee and Richmond, the capital, surrounded, with federal gunboats on the rivers and a string of forts punctuating the trenches that locked Lee’s army down. Lee finally let himself recognize that it was his army, not the city, that was the true objective for Grant’s forces, outnumbering Lee by nearly three to one with every strategic advantage. Trying to get around Grant was doomed to fail. Lee couldn’t get out unless he found a way to break through. Read more…
As excruciating as it can be to bear witness when a loved one is at the end of life, I highly recommend it to everyone given the chance. The things I’ve learned from being in the room with souls whose journeys happen to be winding down are nothing less than sublime gifts given by the person on the bed, separated from me by a thin sheet and a trillion words, most unspoken. At this stage, sometimes there’s a suction tube. And sometimes there truly are no words. There are other ways to listen, though.
It’s sacred business, watching on the periphery as someone is dying, knowing that person may soon find answers I can only dream about. Being in that room is about being inches away from someone’s intensely personal, unique, painful, awful, scary, gorgeous scenery. Just being there without judgment or agenda; just being there with a shocking amount of love and compassion.
I learned a lot about that in my years working in New York City’s pediatric hospitals with the Big Apple Circus Clown Care program, which sends professional clowns to 14 children’s hospitals across the country. On my first day of walking the hospital beat with my partner, both of us dressed as clowns in white “doctor” coats bulging with hospital-approved magic toys, hearts at the ready to get goofy, we were pulled into a room by a wet-eyed mom, asking fervently for a visit for her little girl. Read more…