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Life Arts    H4'ed 3/20/15

The Pursuit of Happiness (REVIEW ESSAY)

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John Bradshaw's book HEALING THE SHAME THAT BINDS YOU (rev. ed., 2005; orig. ed., 1988) is a seminal work. In that book John Bradshaw works with the terms "toxic" and "healthy" to discuss toxic shame versus healthy shame, toxic anger versus healthy anger, and so on. Briefly, he says that we need to resolve our early childhood traumatization in order to recover from toxic emotions and restore our healthy emotions.

To resolve out early childhood traumatization, John Bradshaw says that we need to get in touch with the memories of those traumatizing events that are carried by our psyches, if we can recover them, and experience the unresolved grief involved in those early traumatization, if we are able to. He likes to say that grief is the healing feeling. Typically those early traumas involved fear. But the fear was so strong and alarming that something in our psyches blocked the full force of the experience. So instead of experiencing the full force of the fear, we experienced traumatization.

Simply stated, we will not resolve our traumatization by going around it with our coping skills. To resolve our traumatization, we must go through it, so to speak. However, we should not undertake to work through our past traumatization unless and until we have enough ego strengths to endure such a terrible and terrifying ordeal. In the meantime, we need to learn coping skills to live with and cope with our unresolved traumatization.

Now, John Bradshaw discusses how certain kinds of developmental needs may possibly have been missing in a person's life (pages 31-32). He refers to each missing part of developmental needs as a form of abandonment. He says that each of these forms of abandonment wounds our psyches. In addition, he says that each form of abandonment represents a loss in our lives that we must mourn in order to recover from the unresolved grief in our psyches.

In Dr. Freud's famous paper on "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), he notes that mourning may not always proceed in a healthy way, in which case it turns into melancholia. Therefore, when we mourn the losses involved in the various kinds of abandonment that John Bradshaw discusses, we may not always experience healthy mourning. Instead, we may slip into melancholia.

In her new book THE FEAR CURE: CULTIVATING COURAGE AS MEDICINE FOR THE BODY, MIND, AND SOUL (2015), Lissa Rankin, M.D., does not happen to explicitly advert to John Bradshaw's seminal book, even though her new book complements his seminal book.

No, Dr. Rankin does not discuss unresolved early childhood traumatization, which John Bradshaw centers his attention on. As a result, she understandably does not discuss grief as the healing feeling. However, in my estimate, the final resolution of our unhealthy fears probably involves experiencing grief and the grieving process (also known as the mourning process in Susan Anderson's book THE JOURNEY FROM ABANDONMENT TO HEALING [2000]).

As a physician, Dr. Rankin is concerned about health, so she naturally sets up and works with healthy experiences of the powerful emotion of fear and unhealthy experiences of fear. Naturally she also discusses shame, the focal point of John Bradshaw's book.

In her foreword to Christine Hassler's book EXPECTATION HANGOVER (2014), mentioned above, Dr. Rankin outlines her own life's journey:

"By the time I was thirty-three years old, I was very successful in my career as a doctor, but I was twice divorced, professionally disillusioned, and taking seven medications for a host of health conditions my doctors led me to believe were incurable. . . . [B]y forty-one, I found myself $200,000 in debt, with no agent, no publisher [for her first masterpiece as a writer], and a third failing marriage" (pages xi, xii).

In the introduction to her book THE FEAR CURE (2015), Dr. Rankin says, "It wasn't until almost 15 years later, when I was researching my book MIND OVER MEDICINE: SCIENTIFIC PROOF THAT YOU CAN HEAL YOURSELF [2013], that I fully understood how fear had hijacked not only my mind, but my body. . . . My nervous system had been completely jacked up [as the result of fear-induced stress], and it was affecting every cell in my body through a complicated series of hormonal reactions that were making me sick" (page xxiii).

In her new book Dr. Rankin works with the conceptual construct of our Inner Pilot Lights (her capitalizations). She really likes to use capitalizations: The Fear Cure, Four Courage-Cultivating Truths, Four Fearful Assumptions, etc. Evidently, she also likes to think in terms of fours.

In the example of how the psyche blocks the child from experiencing the full force of the powerful emotion of fear and thereby produces early childhood traumatization, perhaps we could imagine our Inner Pilot Lights as guiding that psyche's intervention.

Dr. Rankin's new book also complements the work in assertiveness training, even though she does not happen to mention that work. In that work, assertiveness is conceptualized as the mean between the extremes of non-assertiveness (also known as passivity) and over-assertiveness (also known as aggressiveness, or hostility). For all practical purposes, fear is the emotion behind non-assertiveness (our flight response kicks in) and over-assertiveness (our fight response kicks in). Rankin does discuss our flight-fight response (page xvii). In effect, she also mentions our freeze response kicking in when she refers to being "paralyzed into inaction" (page xxix).

Dr. Rankin also works with the conceptual constructs of prison -- an inner prison in our psyches -- and soul cage. (Fortunately, she does not also capitalizes these expressions.)

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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