Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

Valentine’s Day in DeKalb: Two, Three, Many Virginia Techs?

Ben Agger and Timothy W. Luke

Last Thursday, February 14^th, 2008, Steven Kazmierczak reportedly shot and killed five students, and then turned a weapon on himself at Northern Illinois University. At least sixteen students were wounded in the rapid-fire shootings in this large NIU lecture hall during class. We have few certain details about the shooter, except that he used four weapons, two of which were purchased legally within the past week—a shotgun and a 9mm Glock semi-automatic handgun. Ironically, he purchased two magazines and a holster for the Glock from the same online vendor which sold Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, one of his guns through a dealer transfer last spring.

Apparently, he was a good student (a former sociology major at NIU) who had no police record. He was pursuing graduate studies in social work at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. It was also rumored that he recently had ceased taking mood-modifying medication and had broken up with a live-in girl friend. He was 27 when he died in the large NIU lecture hall. Yet, there was another side to him. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in September 2001, but soon was “administratively discharged” within six months. More recently, he took a job as an officer at the Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana in September 2007, but he failed to complete his preliminary training after only two weeks, and then never returned to work.

The shooting in DeKalb, Illinois occurred almost exactly ten months after the shootings at Virginia Tech last April, when 33 died, including students in classrooms, some of their professors, and the gunman himself. On November 7, 2007 Pekka Eric Auvinen walked into his high school in Tuusula, Finland, and shot eight people, killing five, and then also turned the gun on himself. There are parallels between these three bloody events: The shooters were young males; they used deadly semi-automatic weapons; they burst into school classrooms to do their damage; they took their own lives. There were apparent differences, too, although as yet we know next to nothing about the ‘real’ Steve Kazmierczak. Cho had already been identified in the Virginia mental health system as a troubled individual, and a potentially dangerous one at that. And Auvinen and Cho left video and written manifestos. In his testimony, Cho acknowledged the inspiration of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who killed twelve of their high-school classmates and a teacher at Columbine in Colorado on April 20, 1999.

How are we to understand the sequencing and connections among Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tuusula, and now Northern Illinois? It is unimaginable that the Valentine Day’s Massacre in DeKalb would have occurred in the way that it did without Virginia Tech having occurred, as the December shootings in Finland also demonstrated. Tech is imbedded in DeKalb as its prototype and possibility. Kazmierczak might have found other ways to kill and to die without the example of Tech (and Columbine or Tuusula before it), but he surely framed his actions last Thursday within the scenario of last April in Blacksburg, Virginia.

 

This is not to suggest that DeKalb is simply a copy-cat killing. What did Klebold, Harris, Cho, Auvinen, and Kazmierczak have in common that led them to enact these epic killings and suicides, on school grounds? It seems they were alone in a crowd; they were alienated, lacking social ties. Whether they were mentally ill or not is somewhat beside the point. They might have been stopped, helped, redirected—yes, even medicated. We are intensely interested in the experience of being alone in a crowd, in Cho’s case as an Asian-American outsider on a big-time college/fraternity campus, which considers itself ‘Hokie Nation,’ —the illusion of tight community achieved through the gridiron Gemeinschaft of the Virginia Tech campus. And in the hours after the NIU attack, the response in DeKalb, Illinois and around the nation was to appeal to the school’s athletic mascot, the Husky, and tout “Huskie Spirit.” Perhaps we know only this: people more on the inside do not tend to commit mass murder and then take their own lives.

It cannot escape notice that the killers at Columbine, Blacksburg, Tuusula and DeKalb were men.  Women usually do not embark on shooting/suicide escapades, even though not even a week before on February 8, 2008 at Louisiana Technical College a female student shot two classmates and then herself in a classroom. Four of the five killed at DeKalb were women students, and many of those killed in Tuusula and Blacksburg also were female. This is a potent admixture: social isolation, male gun culture, fantasies of revenge.

Were the killers evil madmen predestined to wreck havoc? Were they beyond social influence and redirection? They committed mad acts, to be sure. But there is a thin boundary between those who keep their demons within, and at bay, and those who erupt. The answer to these acts of deliberate madness lies not in armoring our campuses but in acknowledging people’s interior turmoil and trying to help, where possible. This is difficult amid a sea of faces in large college lecture halls. But can we afford to reduce such acts merely to irreversible psychopathology? Columbine and Virginia Tech have now become a set piece—a media spectacle--with a certain inexorable momentum.

Ben Agger is professor of sociology and humanities at University of Texas, Arlington.  Timothy W. Luke is professor of political science at Virginia Tech. They co-authored a book There is a Gunman on Campus: Tragedy and Terror at Virginia Tech forthcoming in April 2008.

Creating Presidential Images

by Ruthellen Josselson

As the current political campaign for President intensifies, we are all engaged in creating images of the candidates. The spin doctors try to manage how we will imagine them, but they know perhaps better than anyone that what we each take in about each of the candidates reflects our internal sensitivities even more than what the pundits say. We create one another in our social and political worlds just as much as we do in our personal life. Political drama offers the citizenry opportunities for playing out personal conflict but concealing it beneath the political debate.

I recall a conversation with my tailor several years ago when the debate about the Clinton impeachment was raging. My tailor is an aged man, an immigrant from Italy, who told me that he didn’t mind so much that Clinton was “playing around” with a young intern – but that he did it in the same house where his daughter was – THAT was unforgivable and deserving of ultimate sorts of punishment.

From the viewpoint of the theoretical framework that I set out in Playing Pygmalion: How People Create One Another,  I avidly read each day’s political commentary to track the latest in the imaginary constructions of each of these candidates. I wonder about what is in the unconscious of the American electorate. Are we in search of the good mother, the soothing father, the aggressive warrior, the stern taskmaster? Perhaps others would here like to add their observations of how this is unfolding.

Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D. is professor of psychology at The Fielding Graduate University and was formerly professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as at Harvard University.

A Psychoanalytic Call for Peace Between Believers and Non-believers

by Robert Langs, M.D.

          Four highly visible and prominent authors (S. Harris, D. Dennett, R. Dawkins, and C. Hitchens) have recently penned books that attack religion as a sham and the belief in the existence of a transcendental God as more or less delusional. Believers have tended to respond by pointing out first, that God has a divine plan and acts in mysterious ways, and second, that these writers show considerable ignorance regarding, and misrepresentations of, religious beliefs. As suggested by Harold Bloom, the outcome of this rancorous debate is that only the already convinced are convinced.

          As a psychoanalyst who has developed a new, adaptation-centered paradigm of psychoanalysis and thus a new view of human life, I want to offer an olive branch to both sides of this conflict. It is based on the insight that coping with death and the three forms of death anxiety it evokes—predatory (the fear of being attacked or killed), predator (the guilt-ridden need for punishment by death for harming others), and existential (the fear of one’s personal mortality)—are the fundamental challenges for all of humankind. Uniquely, we meet these threats using two distinctive adaptive systems of the emotion-processing mind, one that is attached to conscious awareness and the other without such a link. The activities of this deep unconscious system are encoded in narratives such as dreams and daydreams. Comparing the reactions of these two systems to the same death-related events we find that conscious responses tend to be muted, infused with denial, and poorly thought out, while deep unconscious reactions tend to be brutally candid, exceedingly wise, and based on grim images of destruction, devastation, and horror.

          Relevant to the effort to make peace between believing and non-believing combatants, clinical observations of patients’ unconscious efforts to cope with traumatic incidents indicate that there are two basic types of individuals. The first group will consistently encode a series of grim themes that validly reflect the most forbidding meanings of a given trauma and its frightful impact on them. In contrast, the second group will either fail to remember a dream or will report a dream that is bland and without the terrifying imagery that one would expect in light of the trauma with which they are dealing. Both responses are ways of shutting off access to their always terrifying deep unconscious perceptions of the trauma at hand. Furthermore, the narrators will always generate strong themes in response to the least trauma and the non-narrators will always react with mild or absent imagery. There are, then, two very different, rather fixed, archetypal ways of coping unconsciously with the death anxieties aroused by a death-related trauma.

          We can apply these findings to believers and non-believers when it comes to the existence of a supernatural God. Both the belief and disbelief in a transcendental God are, at bottom, psychological ways of dealing with death and its attendant anxieties. Depending on how it is utilized, each approach may be either adaptive or dysfunctional. Each has been successful in bringing peace to many individuals and is responsible for peaceful respites for societies and nations. But each also has spawned madness, violence, and war. Given that a person's adaptive preferences, which are consciously and unconsciously motivated and sustained, tend to be almost set in stone, trying to change this preference is a pointless and generally unfeasible task. Extremely difficult and seldom feasible. This means that there are strong reasons to find ways to enhance the efforts of both secularists and those of faith to cope with their death anxieties, which in turn means that it is unwise and unnatural to try to disassemble belief systems related to the existence of God.

           There is, I think, a moral to this story. Both believers and non-believers ultimately are trying to cope with life and its relentless nemesis, death. Each group has, on the basis of many forces unknown to them, come up with an adaptive solution that is reflected in part in their thoughts about the existence of God. But surely, no one can or should tell another person how to go about resolving their death anxieties nor should they decide for them the role that religious beliefs should play in these efforts. One answer does not and cannot fit all. An individual's chosen mode of trying to cope with death anxiety should be respected and every effort made to improve its chances of success through insights into the needs that are satisfied by these convictions.

          Only a joining of forces based on a deep understanding of the positions of those on both sides of this debate and a combining of resources and understanding can help us to ameliorate the power, often evil and destructive, that death holds over our lives. A familiar phrase captures my message: United we conquer, divided we fall.

Robert Langs, M.D. is the author of 45 books on issues pertaining to human emotional life, including the recently published Beyond Yahweh and Jesus: Bringing Death’s Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality, and Psychoanalysis.

Science and Religion: Toward Common Ground

By Edward F. Kelly   

        Conflicts between science and religion have erupted intermittently since the first stirrings of modern science over four centuries ago, and the past year has witnessed searing new attacks on religion by Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and other defenders of Enlightenment rationalism. Critics like these clearly regard themselves, like science itself, as marshalling the intellectual virtues of reason and objectivity against retreating forces of irrational authority and superstition. In their view science has conclusively demonstrated that we human beings are nothing but complicated biological machines. Everything we are and do is in principle explainable in terms of our biology, chemistry, and physics. Mind and consciousness are generated by—or in some mysterious way identical with—neurophysiological processes occurring in brains. Mental causation, volition, and the “self” are illusions, by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery. And because we are entirely the product of this machinery, we are necessarily extinguished, totally and finally, by the death and dissolution of our bodies. To think anything different is to abandon centuries of cumulative scientific progress and revert to the primitive supernaturalist beliefs of bygone times. Period, end of story.

          In reality things are less clear-cut and much more interesting. My intent here is not to side with the institutionalized religions against science. All seem imperfect human creations, and I do not adhere personally to any. But I do believe that real understanding of human nature will be achieved only by expanding current scientific orthodoxy in directions broadly compatible with the central impulse of religion as characterized by the great American psychologist and philosopher William James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience, and I further believe that the primary obstacles to doing so reside within science itself.

      The word “fundamentalism” probably evokes for most of us only images of bomb-wielding Islamic terrorists and other examples of religious extremism, but fundamentalism exists within science as well. When scientific opinion hardens into dogma it becomes scientism, which is essentially a secular faith and no longer science. Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition, but in modern times the main opposition to new scientific ideas has derived not from religious orthodoxies but from other scientists for whom contemporary opinion established the limits of the possible.

      Consider in this light the question of post-mortem survival. The notion that aspects of mind and personality survive bodily death is central to the world’s great religions yet scorned as impossible by present-day establishment science. But few participants in this contentious debate have any inkling that there exists a large scientific literature collectively suggesting that at least some of us, under largely unknown conditions and for some unknown period of time, do in fact survive. The primary threat to this interpretation, ironically, has nothing to do with the quality of the evidence—problems of fraud, credulity, errors of observation or memory, and the like—but with the difficulty of excluding non-survivalist interpretations based solely upon supernormal (“psi”-based or parapsychological) processes involving living persons. The voluminous evidence for such processes includes both spontaneous cases and experimental studies, and in my opinion has long since passed the threshold where competent persons who take the trouble to study it in depth and with an open mind will routinely conclude that these things exist as facts of nature. Indeed, future generations of historians, philosophers, and sociologists will undoubtedly make a good living trying to understand why it took so long for scientists in general to accept this conclusion.

      Either horn of this interpretive dilemma — survival or psi — is lethal to current materialist orthodoxy, which undoubtedly helps explain the hostility of its advocates to both. But many other psychological phenomena pose similarly difficult challenges to conventional ways of thinking. Conditions such as cardiac arrest and general anesthesia, for example, abolish brain conditions regarded by most neurophysiologists as necessary for full consciousness, yet thousands of patients have reported extraordinarily vivid, life-transforming experiences that occurred under these circumstances. Even the most fundamental aspects of everyday mental life including memory, volition, and the qualitative “feels” of consciousness remain unexplained. Everything points, I believe, to the need for an enlarged scientific psychology that can accommodate “transpersonal” or spiritual aspects of human nature without loss of rigor.

      There are more things under Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in today’s mainstream materialist philosophy, and huge questions that so far have been addressed primarily by the world’s great religions are to some degree accessible to the methods of science. There is middle ground between science and the religions as presently constituted, and noisy partisans on both sides ought to know this! As William James himself declared in A Pluralistic Universe, his last book, “Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin.”

Edward F. Kelly is a Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is also the lead author of Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century.

The Greatest Humanitarian since Gandhi: A Memorial to Albert Ellis

By Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.

Ross H. Miller, Ph.D., Senior Editor of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, has asked if I would write a memorial to Dr. Albert Ellis, who died on Tuesday at the age of 93. Dr. Miller expressed hope that my memories of him might be comforting to other travelers of life. It is with sadness, humility, and honor that I recount a part of my personal history that was deeply touched by this quiet hero.

This past spring, Rowman published my book, The New Rational Therapy: Thinking Your Way to Serenity, Success, and Profound Happiness.  Albert Ellis wrote the preface, and my dedication read, “to my friend and mentor, Albert Ellis, who has supported, taught, and inspired me in countless ways.”  These words are meager alongside the magnitude of this man’s gift to humanity. I am here speaking of the psychological revolution he started in the 1950’s, which changed the face of contemporary psychology forever.  Standing firm against the currents of the strongly entrenched Freudian tradition, it was his unique brand of psychotherapy known as Rational-Emotive Behavior therapy (REBT) that redirected psychology from a lengthy psychoanalytic process delving into unconscious motivation arising from past, traumatic experiences to a relatively short-term therapy focusing on thinking and doing in the here-and-now.

In fact, a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association ranked Albert Ellis above Sigmund Freud as the second most influential psychologist in history. Carl Rogers came in first, and Freud Third.

In memoriam to Albert Ellis, The New York Times had the following to say:

"Irreverent, charismatic, he was called the Lenny Bruce of psychotherapy. In popular Friday evening seminars that ran for decades, he counseled, prodded, provoked and entertained groups of 100 or more students, psychologists and others looking for answers, often lacing his comments with obscenities for effect."

Yet, speaking of Albert Ellis in these terms fails to capture the depths of humanity behind his stage presence. What I will always cherish in this man is his predilection for kindness; his genuineness in caring for the plights of others, the manner in which he resonated emotionally with others during their hardest times. What the New York Times failed to mention (among other things) was that the book he was working on (and unfortunately never completed) before his death was a book on the emotion of love.

I came to know Albert Ellis during a difficult time in my life after my father’s death. My father had suffered a lethal heart attack at the age of 60. At the moment of his heart attack, the phone failed to work (due to a phone line that was not operational). My mother had to run next door to call 911. By the time the paramedics arrived, my father had passed.

I was 28 at the time, nearing the end of a one-year, post-doctoral fellowship, and I was confronting a very bleak job market in the field of academic philosophy. Yet I continued to work, publish, and eventually found a permanent job in academia. Emotionally I was numb. Having never stopped to grieve, I had not given myself an opportunity to curse the universe, damn the phone company, and unleash the fury that simmered inside me.  I was functionally robotic for about seven years.

After my father’s death, I began to formulate an approach to behavioral and emotional problems that used logic and philosophy to correct irrational thinking (a form of REBT now known as Logic-Based Therapy). At the time, I was unaware of the work of Albert Ellis, which antedated my own by about three decades. At the prompting of my wife, Gale S. Cohen, a mental health counselor, I began to study Ellis’ theory. Its keynote was the Stoic principle that it isn’t the events in our lives that upset us, but rather the irrational ideas we generate about these events.

Albert Ellis had systematically cataloged the same irrational ideas I was using to disturb myself. As a philosopher, I was trained to think rationally and logically, and ironically it was my demand to think rationally that kept me in a state of emotional turmoil. Dr. Ellis taught that people primarily cause their own emotional and behavioral disturbances by demanding perfection in a universe that is far less than perfect. In refusing to recognize that philosophers too are fallible, irrational creatures, I prevented myself from working through my anger.

However, once I gave myself permission to be human, I became angry at the universe. I damned the universe over the death of my father, and demanded that such awful things never happen, at least to me. Once I had given myself the opportunity to vent these irrational beliefs, I was in a position to expose and work them through. In this way, utilizing the cognitive behavioral tools of REBT, I was able to rescue myself from the abyss of unhappiness.

I first met Albert Ellis about two decades ago when I enrolled in his REBT certification program and trained under him. Remarkably prolific, having written over eighty books, he was always there to inspire me in my work, read and offer commentary on what I had written, and to promptly answer my queries. He was both mentor and friend. After the death of my father, when I was confused and uncertain about my future, Albert Ellis was there for me as he was for the millions of people who have profited from his incredibly effective self-help books.

In 1959, Dr. Ellis founded the Albert Ellis Institute in Manhattan to advance his theory of REBT. He lived frugally upstairs from the Institute, took a salary of $12,000 per year, donated most of his book royalties to the Institute, and even purchased the building on its behalf. It is therefore sadly ironic that, in 2005, some of the individuals he had mentored and brought to the Institute cancelled his celebrated Friday Night Workshops and ousted him from the Board.  However, Dr. Ellis filed suit against the Institute and, in 2006, the New York Supreme Court reinstated him. The Court argued that the alleged reasons for removing him from the board without notice were “disingenuous."

This past spring, I visited him as he lay ill, in a weakened condition in a New York nursing facility, with his devoted wife, Debbie Ellis, by his side.  I held his hand, he looked into my eyes, and eventually he fell asleep holding my hand.

For me, the world now has an indelibly empty place without him; yet it is so much the better for his having been in it. I mourn his death, but not in the same way I mourned the death of my father. I know well what he would tell me about such destructive, self-defeating ideation. And his legacy lives on.  Albert Ellis didn’t leave biological children, but he has nurtured disciples who have formed an REBT Network dedicated to carrying on his life’s work.

The New York Times compared him to Lenny Bruce. But there is another comparison that better captures the essense of this incredibly kind man. In 2004, in the off Broadway play, Trumbo, starring Paul Newman, Albert Ellis was heralded as "the greatest humanitarian since Gandhi." This is just how he deserves to be remembered.

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., is executive co-director and co-founder of the American Society for Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy; professor and chair at the Indian River College; editor-in-chief and founder of The International Journal of Applied Philosophy and The International Journal of Philosophical Practice.

 

Aging Parents, Aging Children is a Gold Award Winner in the 16th annual National Mature Media Awards Program

Aging Parents, Aging Children: How to Stay Sane and Survive by Miriam Aronson and Marcella Bakur Weiner received a Gold Award in Media/Book category in the 16th annual National Mature Media Awards Program. This program is presented by the Mature Market Resource Center. Nearly 1,000 entries were judged by a distinguished panel of mature market experts from across the United States for overall excellence of design, content, creativity, and relevance to the senior market.
Congratulations to the authors and to all involved in producing this wonderful book!

On School Violence

By Elizabeth Berger, M.D., author of Raising Kids with Character

Headlines reporting school violence strike fear into parents and all of our citizens—as well they should. It cannot reassure us to hear that the dramatic assaults which reach national media significance represent the tip of the iceberg, signaling much more pervasive and commonplace problems in our nation’s schools. To respond appropriately to school violence demands that we analyze not only the bizarre and infamous incidents which draw our attention on the news, but also the everyday threats to our children’s safety that give rise to them.

Like most social problems (divorce, drug abuse, crime), school violence has several aspects and a comprehensive approach to solving it will require action on many fronts at once. Perhaps most immediately urgent is the easy availability of guns in our communities. Americans have much higher rates of homicide and suicide BY FIREARMS than other industrialized nations—but the same rates by other means. If we wish to slash these terrible statistics, the most effective means would be to rid ourselves of guns. 

Schools themselves, meanwhile, may gain some traction on the pervasive problem of weapons in the schoolyard through metal detectors, police presence, the installation of alarms, and other measures to “secure” an insecure population. These stop-gap measures may help somewhat. The emotional health of our students is another important and neglected opportunity for intervention, through programs which identify and respond to youngsters presenting academic failure, drug and alcohol use, gang participation, bullying, and other personal crises. To accomplish this, the active involvement of families, youth development agencies, local police, health care providers, religious organizations, and other community structures will be the key to constructive change. 

It is not the make-believe violence in children’s fantasy and amusements (comic books, videos, and television) that inspires violence in schools but the real violence that saturates our actual lives. This is the “bad influence” which we must address. We will see our young people protected from harm only when we truly dedicate ourselves to providing nonviolent solutions to eternal human conflicts which are currently reflected in domestic battery, community assaults, and warfare. This is a more daunting challenge than scanning the lyrics to popular songs and denouncing their author, to be sure, but far closer to the heart of our mission as adults if our genuine aim is to provide a safe and wholesome world for the next generation.

Dr. Elizabeth Berger is a child psychiatrist with thirty years' experience treating children and addressing the needs of families as a policy-advocate.

Aggression in Children: Sealing Off the Fountain

By David A. Crenshaw, Ph.D., ABPP, RPT-S

 

One of the most poignant metaphors for understanding extremely aggressive children comes not from the field of psychology but from literature. C.S. Lewis in his book, The Four Loves (1965) uses this metaphor in an entirely different context but I find it succinctly captures the heart of the pain of many aggressive children. Lewis states, “they seal off the very fountain from which they thirst to drink” (p.65). How sad, how true this is for children who adopt the strategy of keeping others at a distance by their aggressive behavior, thereby protecting from further hurt but “sealing off the very fountain from which they thirst to drink.” They ensure their isolation, their disconnection, thus depriving themselves of what makes life endurable—meaningful closeness with others. James Garbarino (1999) in the Lost Boys observes that so often we do not get close enough to notice the “traumatized child within.” Bruce Perry (2006) observes in his book, The Boy Who was Raised as Dog, that “by conservative estimates, about 40 percent of American children will have at least one potentially traumatizing experience by age eighteen: this includes the death of a parent or a sibling, ongoing physical abuse and/or neglect, sexual abuse, or the experience of a serious accident, natural disaster or domestic violence or other violent crime” (pp. 2-3). Kenneth Hardy and Tracy Laszloffy (2005) in Teens Who Hurt discuss the “invisible wounds” and profound losses aggressive and sometimes violent teens suffer. While violence is never a solution, we must appreciate the complex dimensions to these problems if we wish to address adequately the issue of youth aggression.

Sometimes we don’t see the “traumatized child within”, “the invisible wounds” or the “fawn in the gorilla suit” because we become inducted as parents, teachers, and therapists in the overly punitive climate that permeates our culture. The German poet and philosopher Goethe once said, “We see in the world, what we carry in our heart.” How is it that we don’t notice the inner pain that drives the acting-out behavior of our children? The notion that more punitive approaches, harsher punishment, and longer periods of incarceration will resolve the problem of youth violence ignores the reality pointed out by Anna Freud more than 60 years ago that these approaches are hardly novel. When these children are already broken down in spirit does it make sense to subject them to even harsher and more punitive correctional methods? As Kenneth V. Hardy, Director of the Eikenberg Institute for Relationships in New York City, has stated, “Children need less correction, and more connection. They need less confrontation, and more validation.” Raffi Cavoukian (Cavoukian & Olfman, 2006) writes, “Children who feel seen, loved, and honored are far more able to become loving parents and productive citizens. Children who do not feel valued are disproportionately represented on welfare roles and police records. Much of the criminal justice system deals with the results of childhood wounding (the vast majority of sexual offenders, for example, were themselves violated as children), and much of the social service sector represents an attempt to rectify or moderate this damage, which comes at an enormous cost to society. Most of the correctional work is too little, too late” (pp. xi-xx).

One of the most effective ways to validate children is to recognize and honor what they have to give, to highlight their strengths and talents, to find in them what Robert Brooks describes as “islands of competence” and to build on them. In support of Hardy’s and Brook’s views, sociologist Roger Curry (2004) in his book The Road to Whatever, reported on his interviews with today’s youth. He discovered that a crucial turning point in the lives of these young people was learning or relearning how to care about themselves—to view themselves as people who mattered. Clearly, these turning points are facilitated when “charismatic adults” (a term coined by the late Dr. Julius Segal) are available to the adolescents (Brooks and Goldstein, 2004). Brooks and Goldstein explain that a charismatic adult “is an adult from whom a child can gather strength.” In studies of resilience, the presence of at least one charismatic adult is one of the key factors enabling youth to overcome adversity in their lives.

While our culture is oriented toward punishment and correctional approaches, the research consistently shows that it is meaningful connections between youth and the key adults in their lives that enable young people to turn their lives around in a positive way. In the absence of healing relationships with committed adults today’s lonely and alienated youth will continue in their desperate attempts to protect from further hurt, to “seal off the very fountain from which they thirst to drink.”

References:

Brooks, R. and Goldstein, S. (2004). Raising resilient children: Fostering strength, hope, and optimism in your child. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Cavoukian, R. & Olfman, S. (2006). Child honoring: How to turn this world around. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Currie, E. (2004). The road to whatever: Middle-Class culture and the crisis of adolescence. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Garbarino, J. (1999). Lost boys: Why our sons turn violent and how we can save them. New York: Anchor Books, A Division of Random House.

Hardy, K. V., & Laszloffy, T. (2005). Teens who hurt: Clinical interventions to break the cycle of adolescent violence. New York: Guilford Press.

Lewis, C. S. (1960). The four loves. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Perry, B. D. (with Szalavitz, M.). (2006). The boy who was raised as a dog and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook: What traumatized children can teach us about loss, love, and healing. New York: Basic Books.

David A. Crenshaw, Ph.D., ABPP is the founding director of Rhinebeck and Child Family Center, LLC, in Rhinebeck, New York. He is Board Certified in Clinical Psychology and a Registered Play Therapist Supervisor. He is the author of Bereavement, Evocative Strategies in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy and a forthcoming book, Healing Paths to a Child's Soul. Additionally, he is co-author with John Mordock, Ph.D. of A Handbook of Play Therapy with Aggressive Children and Understanding and Treating the Aggression of Children: Fawns in Gorilla Suits, both published by Jason Aronson Publishers.