Marcia E. Brubeck, LLC

Recovering Your Life Story

In your early to mid twenties you probably remembered just about everything that had ever happened to you—or at least it seemed that way.  You could recall the name of your third grade teacher, for instance, or the next door neighbors in Pittsburgh whose dogs constantly left unwelcome gifts in your mother's dahlias.

But by the time you reach forty-five, say, or fifty, or (heaven forfend!) even sixty, it's a different story.  You may find things missing from your personal time line.  Sure, you can remember where you worked in 1979 and where you lived, but you can no longer evoke Christmas of 1986 or your birthday that year. 

Yet this time doesn't need to remain forever lost. With a little detective work, you can restore the past to memory and recover your life story.  In the process, you will create a memoir that will let you more fully appreciate the richness of your experience and your own personal journey.  Here are a few tips to get you started.

First, make yourself a time line.  Put on it each year of life, and fill in the basics—home addresses, names of schools and employers, the dates of anniversaries, births, and other important moments.  If you can, fill in the names of friends, teachers, and neighbors.  Put down the make and model of your family's cars and the ones you've owned as an adult.  Don't overlook past pets and hobbies you've enjoyed.  (Do you know any stamp collectors today?)  Try to recall at least one event for each year.  Let each memory lead you to others.  You are creating your own biography.  How far back in time can you go?

List some personal questions you can ask yourself about each stage of your life.  What clothes did you wear?  What foods did you enjoy?  How about your favorite books, cartoons, music, movies, and television shows?  An elderly judge of my acquaintance used to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies on his television set each night—not because he loved the movies, wonderful as they were, but because they let him remember how it felt to see them as a young man.

In your quest for personal history, don't overlook these key sources:

• household artifacts that survive from past generations, such as your mother's mixer, your grandmother's recipe for snickerdoodles, the family Bible, furniture, dishes and flatware, and jewelry.
• snapshots that show you the settings of your life.  Remember that wallpaper and the dining room chairs on which your father rocked back every night at dinner?  Or the baize glass door letting onto the back porch, through which you could see your mother coming to rescue you with Band-Aids?  What rituals, games, and family pastimes have disappeared in the mists of time?  How about gadgets and gizmos—record players, typewriters, table radios, pencil boxes, and toys?
• older friends and family members who knew you when, whose memories can usefully supplement your own.  When you speak with old people, notice their language.  Do they use phrases or expressions that would be unfamiliar to today's teenagers?  Conversations about past times shared can be a wonderful way to celebrate relationships.  If you go online, using Facebook or Classmates.com, for example, you  may be able to reconnect with people you haven't seen in years.
• newspapers and magazines from different periods.  Do you remember when (and how) the country marked the centennial of the Civil War?  When you add major historical events to your time line, can you recall how you felt about them as they were happening?  Where were you during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

You may also want to return to different places to spark more memories.  How does your childhood home look to the older you?  How has the neighborhood changed?  If you walk through the doors of your elementary school, does the smell of floor wax remind you of anything? You might also enjoy visiting antique shops, which appeal to many people precisely because the sight of long-forgotten but familiar objects triggers precious memories.

All of us constantly reinvent ourselves from birth to the grave.  In the process we are creating a narrative that has a coherent beginning, a middle, and an end, makes sense of the life we have lived, and celebrates us as storytellers for future generations.  In this way we fashion our identities as eyewitnesses of our times and also remind ourselves of who we are and of the values we stand for.
 

Futureproof Your Child, III: Honor Feelings

Most people don’t pay enough attention to emotions: they often ignore their own and dismiss those of others. For maximum success in the world, your child should do neither one. The parent-child relationship gives you enormous leverage as a teacher and role model.  Communication skills are key. How can you, the parent, lay a solid foundation in this area?

Start with a personal inventory. Do you honor your own feelings? Ideally, you are exquisitely self-aware, processing news bulletins from your body day in and day out. You notice when your foot itches, when you feel a twinge of hunger, and when you are bothered by an unpaid bill, the theft of your driver’s license, your heated conversation with your sister on Monday, or your spouse’s failure to come home on time last night. In each case, you register the feeling, identify ways of allaying it, and follow through until you get results.

You express anger appropriately to the individuals concerned. When you are distressed, too, you soothe yourself as you would a small child. After a disappointment or loss you might buy yourself a rose, get a massage, or go to the movies. When you have labored long and hard, you treat yourself to extra rest and recreation. You show yourself no less than a mother’s or a father’s kindness. (Once we grow up, we all have to parent ourselves.)

If these paragraphs describe you, congratulations! Your child is learning to honor her feelings and take care of them. If you swallow or stuff your feelings, resorting to junk food, alcohol, drugs, or compulsive behavior involving something else, try to pinpoint the cause, both for your own sake (to find healthier ways of soothing yourself) and for that of your child. You want to make your feelings at home in your body so that your child can do the same.

The easiest way to increase your child’s awareness of her feelings is to inquire about them. When you are debriefing her after a day at school, ask, “How did that make you feel?” Label feelings that you see on your child’s face when the two of you are together. “You look sad,” you might say. “Can you tell me about that?”  Teaching your child about emotions is an important parenting skill.

When the two of you disagree about a directive you have issued, “You look angry, and we can talk about that, but I still need you to clean your room.” When she compares your label with her bodily sensations, she gains a frame of reference she can use every time she sees someone else’s emotions.

Help your child grasp the meaning of empathy. Look for ways to invite him to notice other people’s feelings. Ask him how he thinks a classmate reacted when the teacher blamed her for doing something she didn’t do. How did the shopkeeper respond when someone tried to steal candy? What is it like for people who are speaking when someone else interrupts them? How does it feel to be insulted or dismissed as unimportant or unworthy of attention?

Some children seem to grasp empathy instinctively. These are the youngsters who look out the car window and express concern for the old woman who slipped on the ice or for the stray dog that looks hungry. Other kids need more help. If your child seems to fall into this latter category, remind him of how he felt when something comparable happened to him. Explore the feeling in memory. Say, “Watching you, how would I have known what you were feeling? When you are feeling this way, how do you make yourself better?”

Ideally, your child tells you about his feelings. You treat them as important. You model good listening skills: you give your child your full attention without interrupting. You ask questions so that you understand better. You do not criticize him or tell him that he doesn’t feel as he says he does. (He is the expert on his feelings!) You ask what he plans to do next. You avoid giving directions unless he asks you for advice.

You tell him that as long as he does not insult, injure, or destroy anything or anybody, his feelings deserve acknowledgment from other people. You invite him to notice the relief in his body when he expresses himself. You teach him that people who tell him to “suck it up” or “pull yourself together” are people who become anxious at the sight of normal human emotions. Their anxiety is their problem and not his. You thank him for letting you know how he feels.

Feelings, natural and inevitable, unite us with all other humans. No matter where we live, what language we speak, or what we believe, everyone has the same basic feelings. When your child voices his, he opens himself to enjoying the understanding, appreciation, and support of others. He can also reach out to others in return. Whatever he may be feeling, he is not alone.

Our feelings are the parts of us that are most quintessentially ours. Over time, beauty fades, brains falter, and physical strength subsides. In contrast, our feelings arrive before birth and depart only at death. Because they convey the joy or pain of every moment, they color our lives. Without them we live in black and white. They are our best guides to the things that we need to savor life to the full.

Futureproof Your Child, II: Clarify Expectations

One of the most important jobs parents have is teaching their children how to act in the world. There’s more at stake than values. It’s important for everyone to know how to behave in different situations. Each grownup has many different roles. You are a parent, a relative, a partner, an employee, a citizen, a friend, and goodness knows what else. As you ready your child for adult life, you will want him to understand what each role entails.

For starters, ask yourself what your child learns from you. Let’s say you have a rough day at the office. Perhaps your boss was unfair—didn’t listen to your side of the story or micromanaged you or put you down (just a few examples). How do you talk about it when you get home? 

When you reach the dinner table, do you stab at the air with a fork and rail against the injustice of a fate that left you at the mercy of such an ogre? More generally, do you blame something or somebody else for everything that goes wrong? Or do you take a more philosophical stance, express outrage, acknowledge some ownership at least occasionally, and look for constructive ways of dealing with the issues?

Your child is watching. It has been said that children are the world’s best observers and the world’s worst interpreters. Talk to your child. Use your experience, past and present, to draw explicit inferences for her so that she sees how your actions reflect your and society’s expectations.

Teach your child respect for authority. To do so, you will need to identify authority figures in different walks of life—not just parent and teacher and adult and policeman but also minister, mayor, and elderly person, for example. In each case, you can proactively prepare your child for success in the wider world. Perhaps you want him to remove his baseball cap, extend his hand, and introduce himself. Perhaps you want him, under circumstances that you specify, to make an offer of help: can I carry that for you? let me open that door, unscrew that jar lid, or pick up that newspaper. Whatever the skill, don’t just tell the child. Start rehearsing it when he is very young.

One of the most basic skills is listening. Consider what you regard as proper procedure in this area (your answer will depend in part on your culture). You might, for example, expect your child to stop playing, look at you while you are speaking, listen until you have finished, and then reply.

If you want your child to learn this skill, have her practice it—not because the instructions are complicated but to ensure that they stay in memory. (We remember what we do better than what we merely see or hear.) You can create a fun and low-key learning environment by having two people in your family demonstrate the skill while the others watch, critique, and then take a turn as performers. If you have your child rehearse skills in this way, you can refer to the rehearsal (an event in memory) when you remind her of behavior that you expect to see in a specific situation, for example, on a visit to see Aunt Mary in the nursing home or a trip to church or a shopping expedition at Wal-Mart.

I believe that parents, pressed for time, often make the mistake of expecting children to display skills that have not been taught. Have you shown your child how you want the trash to be emptied? how the dog should be fed? how (and where) to put one toy away before bringing out more? how to wash the dishes? (At age sixty I still remember my father showing me at age ten how to dry the cast iron skillet and how to wipe down the kitchen counters before leaving the room!)

As you take stock of desirable skills, don’t forget the bigger stuff. You want your child to know how to set limits with peers and how to compromise. He also needs to know how to apologize. You don’t want him just to say he’s sorry; you want him to show that he understands what he did wrong and to offer to make amends. Something else he needs to know is how to ask you, the parent, to revisit an unpopular decision. “What would I need to do?” is usually a more fruitful approach than “Come on!  That’s not fair!” or “That’s stupid! You just don’t understand!” (Once you’ve said no and meant it, you may want to give him one, and only one, “right of appeal.”)

As you identify different skills, take a moment in each case to jot down the steps you want your child to follow during the rehearsal. The listening example just given might go as follows:

1. Stop what you are doing
2. Face me and make eye contact
3. Listen without interrupting me
4. When I finish, repeat in a few words what I just said
5. Reply

To learn more about breaking skills down into steps, look at Skillstreaming the Elementary School Child: New Strategies and Perspectives for Teaching Prosocial Skills by Ellen McGinnis and Arnold P. Goldstein and Skillstreaming the Adolescent: New Strategies and Perspectives for Teaching Prosocial Skills by Arnold P. Goldstein and Ellen McGinnis.

Once you have targeted key skills, analyzed them, and rehearsed them, you will want to reinforce them. The best way of doing so is to notice—as often as you can—what your child is doing right. You want to make a big fuss over the blue ribbon performances. In fact, you could do worse than to praise your child each day for five feats. “I am so proud of you,” you will say. “You did a great job of handling that situation!” Your child will beam with pleasure.

Last and crucially important, you want your offspring to be able to handle mistakes. To teach this essential life skill, you must first be able to detach from your own sometimes powerful emotions in the face of your child’s screw-up. If you go ballistic—turn red in the face and start yelling—your child’s takeaway message will be that you sometimes become scary. When you are scary, your behavior commands more attention than your words.

Instead, take a deep breath and calmly encourage your child to describe the mishap. Then ask what he hoped the result would be. Invite your child to tell you how the actual outcome differed from what he had envisioned. See whether, with help, he can learn from his mistakes. You want him to strategize to get a better result in the future (and to repair whatever damage may have been done). If your child has difficulty taking responsibility when he is at fault, you can express surprise that the blameless behavior he is describing produced a result so greatly at odds with what might have been anticipated, given his description of events.

Your goal in all cases should be to reward honesty and to discourage dishonesty (remember that conversation about values?). You also want to normalize mistakes and to help your child see them as opportunities for change. Above all you want to keep well-intentioned blunders from arousing feelings of guilt, shame, or inadequacy. We all make mistakes—there is no room in this world for perfect people—and we all need to be able to pick ourselves up and move on with our self-respect intact. Your child will not be able to forgive others if he cannot be charitable with himself. 

Stay Tuned, Stay Attuned

Did you watch the debate between Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that was televised last night from Texas?  I did.  It didn't really strike me as a debate.  The candidates said anything they felt like saying, regardless of the question.  And for the most part there wasn't much difference between the two sets of policies and proposals.

Still, I thought Barack and Hillary sent profoundly different messages.  It wasn't so much what they said as how they said it.  The net effect had partly to do with the expression of agreement or disagreement, appreciation or criticism, but even more to do with eye contact, posture, and gestures.

Much of the exchange in any conversation is unspoken—a matter of give-and-take, body language, and tone of voice.  The process of asking and answering reaches well beyond the words.  People have different styles in this area.  Part of the message is communicated through mimicry, or attunement.

So what unspoken messages did the candidates send last night, to each other and to us?  Hillary faced forward, gazing into the cameras much of the time and smiling.  When she turned toward Obama, her facial expression betrayed little of her reaction to what he was saying.  She used her hands somewhat to gesture, but for the most part she held her upper body still.  Her voice, and her language, seemed formal.

Obama, on the other hand, turned toward Hillary often when she was talking.  He frequently held up one finger when he wanted a chance to reply.  Occasionally he interjected, "That's true" or "That's not so."  His hands gestured freely as he spoke.  He responded to Hillary's remarks with his body language and his facial expressions.  His tone of voice might have been the same one he uses with his next-door neighbor.

Hillary appeared to be giving a speech to the audience.  Barack, on the other hand, seemed to be engaged in a genuine conversation.  He was available: alert to Hillary, responsive, actively listening.  He seemed more connected, not only to his rival for the nomination but also to us observers in the same auditorium and far away.  This willingness to connect, across a room or across broadband, will presumably help determine whether he wins our confidence and our trust.

If you doubt the power of attunement, imagine yourself preparing for an important exam that will decide whether you can go to graduate school.  You are filled with self-doubt.  You talk to your uncle, hoping for reassurance.

"I'm worried that I'll flunk the math part," you say.  "It's been a long time."  He answers, "How long has it been?" and then, after you've told him, "Oh, you're right, that is a long time."  How does this response feel to you?  It's deflating, right?  Wouldn't you rather have your uncle wrap his arm around your shoulders and say, "You'll be fine!  And you have lots of practice with multiple choice tests.  You've always aced them"?

Or consider the way in which your best friend listens to your complaints about your boss.  "That's absolutely awful!" she says in a low, gentle voice.  "Anybody would have been upset to be patronized that way.  What a total bum!"  She listens, and at strategic intervals she echoes your words and your pain.  She reaches out to you.  She shows you that she is fully in synch, supporting you in your distress.

When other people seemed tuned in to us, we feel that we have been heard.  When the give-and-take of communication is audible, visible, and palpable, we feel less alone, more connected.  In such empathic company, we are able to relax, aware that we have resources we can call on.  We are better able to cope with challenges.

Our ability to apply our unspoken knowledge of the rules of communication determines how well we fare socially in our lives—how others perceive us and how satisfying we find our relationships.  For the two Democratic contenders, on the other hand, communication style will have larger consequences.  The question is less likely to be which candidate is more capable, knowledgeable, or experienced than whether Democratic voters want a president who appears aloof , self-contained, and dispassionate or one who seems warm, open, and responsive.  Time alone will tell.

Futureproof Your Child, I: Instill Values

Childrearing is a lot like whitewater canoeing: there are many shoals to avoid, and the journey is long and hard. So how do you help your child become a resilient, responsible, and kind adult able to find rewarding work and relationships in the world? First you need to instill values.

From childhood onward, your experience has given you certain principles to live by. I’m not saying that you have copied your mother or your father (or your sister or your brother!) wholesale. Maybe you decided to do the opposite of what they did. But somehow, watching the people around you, you learned how to be a man or a woman, a husband or a wife, a sister or a brother, a friend, a citizen, and an employee. And you have formed opinions that you follow.

Your child is watching your every move. Your example is for her the single most influential source of information. If you say one thing and do another, what will your child learn? Ask yourself where your values come from.

Discuss values with your child as often as you can. Talk about your beliefs. Ask what your child believes. Find out what other people believe. Invite your child to consider different worldviews. Talk about what your family stands for. Beliefs encompass matters of faith (religion) but also attitudes about education, books, music, food, war, taxes, elected officials, neighbors, and ever so much more.

So when am I supposed to do all this, you ask? My favorite teaching or discussion ops are together times: car trips, dinner, and family time (a once-a-week get-together to discuss family business and have fun). Experiment with these different ways of approaching values, some new and some old-fashioned:

· Have family members bring questions and answers to the dinner table for an informal quiz about people and events in the news (something like the NPR talk show “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!”). Award points for correct answers—and discuss them.

· Assign research projects. You might tell a child to check the Internet for information on how old you must be to drive a car in different states. You might also invite your kid to interview the neighbors about the town’s curfew. Why do people pass such laws?

· Have a “hypothetical” moment. Ask your children whether it would be okay if a man stole a co-worker’s wallet to buy a compact disc. Then change the scenario: would the theft be okay if the man had no money for food and was very hungry? Suppose the man’s wife was ill and needed medicine? And what if the man had infant triplets at home and no money to buy them milk?

· Read aloud from a newspaper, book, or magazine and ask your children what they think about it. The editorial page offers some possible copy, as do advertisements, poetry, and even cartoons.

· Invite your kids to dress up and put on a skit (you might even videotape it) about stopping bullies in school (bullies should get the chance to play victims and vice versa) or asking the teacher to stop yelling. Or appoint lawyers and a judge to deal with vandalism.

· Select movies or documentaries, supply popcorn, and have a discussion period afterward.

· Play challenging games. The old standbys Risk (ages ten to adult) and Diplomacy (teenagers and adults) invite players to think about international relations. Some older video games that challenge children and ask them to balance competing interests are Sim City, Zoo Tycoon, Age of Empires, and Civilization. A newer generation, created by the Federation of American Scientists (you can Google it), includes Discover Babylon (Mesopotamian civilization for ages eight to fourteen), Immune Attack (immunology for high school and college students), and Multicasualty Incident Response (training for adult firefighters). Video games are starting to take on real-world issues!

Don’t miss the opportunities afforded by dinner table conversation. If there was a problem, how did different observers see it? Invite your child to notice how people view matters differently. How should disputes be settled? How do we settle them? Ask your child: if you were going to design a better world, what would you change? How would you go about making changes?

The important questions have no right or wrong answers. If your child learns to think about the issues and to act in ways that reflect his principles, over time he will understand the importance of diversity in our communities as well as the need for all voices to be heard.

Finding Your Bliss

In order to feel productive and purposeful in our lives, each of us must have a personal vision. If you close your eyes and imagine the good life (where you want to be, doing what, and with whom), you are contemplating your vision. You should be able to walk around in it. In your mind’s eye, notice the landscape, the weather, the time of day, how you are spending your working hours and your leisure time, and other details.

For planning purposes, your personal vision needs to be accompanied by a map with way stations, resting places that let you look forward and backward. Otherwise you have no way of knowing where you are headed or of being sure that your life is reaching toward your goals and fulfilling your values.

Some times of the year seem tailor made for taking stock. Birthdays are one. Thanksgiving and Christmas are others. Like the cycling seasons of the year, endings and beginnings help give us a sense of order and predictability.

The way stations, moments of retrospection and introspection, let us pause to appreciate what we have done and where we have been and to make adjustments to the course we have charted for the future. Wouldn’t it be terrible if we just kept plodding onward without ever feeling that we had completed anything?

And yet sometimes we lose sight of our objectives. We feel that we have lost direction, gotten off course. Something seems to be missing from our daily life and work. If this problem sounds familiar, try these tricks.

Cast back in memory and recall things that you have loved doing. Maybe you were a champion archer, or you loved playing the flute, or you spent countless hours hiking the woods behind your home in Vermont. Wrack your brains for moments when you loved what you were doing so much that you forgot who you were, where you were, and what time it was. Each of us has perhaps four or five such activities at a minimum. These are your passions.

When you indulge your passions, your mind and your senses are fully deployed. You are totally absorbed, at one with the activity in which you are engaged. For some number of minutes or hours, you lose track of yourself as separate from your environment. At the end, when you emerge, you feel deeply relaxed and refreshed, like a diver surfacing for air after a plunge.

Consider such episodes your meditations. Look for ways to add them to your life. The joy that they bring comes not from accomplishing or acquiring but from thrilling to the moment at hand.

As you look back through the years, pick out the highlights and the challenges. Ask yourself what else you might want for your future. In five years, where would you like to be? Close your eyes. See yourself in that geographical place, and look around. Who is with you? Where are you living and working? What are you doing? What is the weather like? How do you spend each day? Open your eyes and try charting a course, month by month, year by year, to make this vision a reality.

If you still have trouble figuring out what is missing from your life, do these exercises. Fast-forward in time until you are perhaps eighty (or the age of your choice). Now look back. What would you want to have accomplished or experienced in your life that you have not yet done?

Alternatively, imagine that you have died. You are writing your own obituary. What would you like to be remembered for? Have you given yourself fully to this work? What more would you want to do in the time that remains to you?

You are the architect of your life. Its shape and course reflect your character and values like nothing else. When you devote yourself completely to work that thrills you, you are most fully alive, making your own unique contribution to history.

On the Absence of Empathy

Douglas LaBier, who directs the Center for Adult Development in Washington, D.C., has identified a new and alarming illness afflicting Americans. According to LaBier, “empathy deficit disorder” is “a pervasive but overlooked condition with profound consequences for the mental health of individuals and our society” (“Empathy: Could It Be What You’re Missing?” Washington Post, December 25, 2007).

LaBier finds a number of his psychotherapy clients lacking in empathy. They include a husband deaf to his wife’s complaints, a technocrat indifferent to the long-term effects of global warming, and a financier content to dismiss the entire American Muslim community as “all terrorists anyway.”

People suffering from such blind-sidedness, according to LaBier, fail to recognize that “we’re all one, bound together.” Conversely, when we develop empathy, he tells us, we “can deepen [our] understanding and acceptance of how and why people do what they do and [we] can build respect for others.”

LaBier is right, I believe, but there’s more.

Empathy, by allowing us to bridge two disparate states of mind or states of being (ours and someone else’s), lets us transcend ourselves. It gives us our best shot at escaping existential loneliness, so that we feel we belong in a world with others. Just consider these polar extremes:

Telling vs. listening. When I insist on my version of events, disregarding yours, I cut myself off from discovering things you and I have in common. Listening gives me the chance to learn from (and about) you; if I ignore you, you may become angry and resentful.

Knowing vs. understanding. When I claim that my truth alone is right and dismiss your truth as incorrect because it is different, I am saying that my point of view is superior to yours—that I am better than you. You probably will not like this idea. Instead I could admit the possibility of two coexisting truths.

Judgmental vs. accepting. You and I are peers. As long as I use law, brute force, or some other means to control you—unless we agree on the terms—I am declaring you deficient for being unlike me. (When you and I feel differently about things, aren’t both feeling states necessarily within the spectrum of human potential? After all, both of us are human.)

Reactive vs. adaptive. If I insist that my knowledge alone is correct, I will need to defend myself constantly against potentially threatening ideas from people who disagree. By incorporating their viewpoints into my own, on the other hand, I might improve my own chances of surviving and prospering in the world of others.

Individualist vs. globalist. The never-ending effort to guard my turf against assaults, literal and figurative, may cause me to overlook global developments positive and negative. I lose an opportunity to create win-win scenarios.

Isolationist vs. communitarian. When I fence myself in and stay focused on the narrowest possible definition of my situation, I forfeit the support of other people like me. I also miss the chance to reach out to isolates who want to join the community.

Short term vs. long term. Self-absorbed and oblivious to the larger environment, I miss the opportunity to view myself and my endeavors in the context not just of my own life span but also of posterity.

Empathy orients us temporally, locally, emotionally, and spiritually. It grounds us and lets us know we belong. It nourishes the value system by which we guide our lives individually and collectively. It allows us to accept and accommodate ourselves and others, acknowledging everyone’s right to a place at the world table. It gives us the basis for educating future citizens. Perhaps most important, in this age of terror, it enables us to create security for ourselves as we ensure the community’s responsiveness to everyone’s needs.

In Pursuit of Silence

Wherever you are in twenty-first-century America, just flip a switch—or do nothing at all. Carefully mixed and edited sound is everywhere. You can tune in at the store, in your car, in your doctor’s office, at your place of work, and even in the woods.

In the supermarket, we hum along. Stopped at a traffic light, we dance in our seats. Different songs energize us, unite us in patriotism, draw tears, dignify disappointment, or prime us for romance. Melody often soothes. Recorded tunes are predictable: they stay the same for every performance.

Still, our private concerts isolate us. If I am listening to my MP3 player, I am not chatting with you. Even if you are standing right beside me, we are cut off from each other. I have partly withdrawn from you and the outside world. Why?

The whine of the chainsaw and the distant drone of backhoes—these jarring noises and others provoke ongoing residual irritation, a form of low-key anxiety. I can’t stop them; you can’t either. Perhaps we push a button to drown them out. If so, the cure is not without cost. In fragmenting our consciousness, we cut ourselves off from awareness of our bodies.

Each day, weather permitting, I drive to the top of Talcott Mountain to Reservoir 6. It’s a manmade lake, long and jagged, flanked on one side by steep woods and on the other by a dike. As I walk the 3.76 mile perimeter, I share the path with other hikers and runners. I seldom see one without headphones or ear buds.

In the woods I hear the tattoo of woodpeckers, the rustling of squirrels, and the soughing of the wind. The cold air is laced with the acrid smell of the wet leaves underfoot, beneath the ice and snow. Around me lies a black-and-white landscape, cold and austere, to which these sounds and smells belong and through which I am moving, one stride at a time. If I watch closely, I may glimpse a heron poised at the water’s edge below me. All of this information is compatible, complementary.

I wonder what would happen if we all unplugged. Suppose we pulled off the Walkman, doused the radio, and just listened. What would we learn about our surroundings and our responses to them? If we did not retreat into isolation, how else could we take care of ourselves? Reflecting, I found myself transported back in time.

It was August 1986. I was paying a first visit to Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, a place with virgin forest and acres of unpicked wildflowers but without traffic or electricity. The machine-free quiet of each day there settled around my ears like a weightless blanket, oddly velvety. Of course it was not really silence. I could hear birds, voices, the wind, and the sea, but nothing seemed out of place or out of proportion. I found the experience liberating and enlightening.

The natural world shows me congruence, both within myself and between me and my surroundings. It helps me feel connected, whole, alert to harmony and to dissonance, ready to respond. I can’t help regarding this willingness to engage, mind and body, as necessary for my well-being. Without it, how can I—or can any one of us—fully witness and participate in the world?

More Talk Therapy Without the Talk

In the packed hospital auditorium, 260 therapists raptly watch as Bessel van der Kolk, MD, energetic pioneer in the nonverbal treatment of trauma, speaks of his work.  Van der Kolk hails originally from the Netherlands, and trauma is part of his family history (his father was in a concentration camp).  An internationally renowned psychiatrist and head of the Trauma Center in Boston, Van der Kolk has taught at Harvard University and has sat at the feet of such psychotherapeutic notables as Fritz Perls and Harry Stack Sullivan.

Van der Kolk has a slightly clipped accent, the thinly masked impatience of the brilliant thinker, and the capacity to mesmerize his listeners for six hours or more without relying on notes or an outline.  He tells it like it is, wryly commenting, for instance, on the absence of psychiatrists in his audience, "We psychiatrists know it all anyway."  The audience, 98 percent social workers, roars appreciatively.

His message?  Well, there are many.  Perhaps first, trauma is all about the oldest, reptilian part of our brains.  Trauma lives in the body and cannot be reached through the thinking parts of the brain involved with language.  When a disaster happens, we take flight.  We run from the World Trade Center.  We try to go home, where we can feel safe and be comforted by loved ones.  If we can get there, we are likely to recover, but if catastrophe strikes at home and there is no escape, we feel helpless and trapped, and we are more likely to suffer long-term damage.

In the face of distress, we regulate our bodies, sensations, and emotions in many ways.  When we change our posture, for instance, we recalibrate ourselves.  Our emotions prompt us to move, to shift our relationship to the external environment.  In the face of disaster, powerful stress hormones urge us to take action.

People soothe each other through a process Van der Kolk calls attunement.  Imagine a mother comforting an infant.  She touches, strokes, hugs, coos, rocks, and sings to the child, and her facial expressions are part of the message.  Adults engaged in conversation do something comparable.  They set up rhythms in their communication.  Getting on the same wave length is more important than the substance of what is said.  As people become attuned, they mirror each other.  Trauma disrupts this healing connection, leaving the sufferer cut off, marooned in the past.

Talk therapy doesn't work for trauma, Van der Kolk says.  "If words are the currency of the therapeutic relationship, we are at a serious disadvantage, because when we ask people to talk about what happened, they will relive it and become retraumatized."  As therapists we should concern ourselves not with the story of what happened, which remains in the past, but with the trauma's imprint on the present.  Indeed, the therapist need not know what happened at all.  He or she can simply ask the sufferer to recall a feeling.

Once a painful sensation has been reawakened, relief may come from moving the body:  "How does it feel when you breathe deeply?  When you stand up?  When you stretch?"  Tai chi and qi guong, like yoga, offer people physical means of regulating themselves.  (Van der Kolk notes that Westerners don't have much of a tradition of self-regulation; instead we resort to Lunesta, Zoloft, and alcohol.)  Vigorous activity (playing squash, for example, or practicing one of the martial arts) can improve a person's ability to attend and to focus on the here and now.  Imagining a different outcome can also help--as when the child Noah, after witnessing the destruction of the World Trade Center, pictured huge trampolines waiting to catch the people who jumped out of windows.

Staying focused on the sufferer's body, the therapist tries to bring the thinking part of the brain back on  line.  The story of the trauma cannot emerge while the victim feels numb.  Rather it must wait until the sufferer feels a sense of strength.  The cure, then, is not a cerebral understanding of events.  Understanding does not make the pain go away.  Rather the therapeutic goal is to enlarge the brain's centers of self-awareness, to remove trauma's interference with present functioning, and to increase the person's sense of feeling alive.

Reconfiguring Old Age

Okay, I freely admit it.  I am about to turn sixty years old.  Am I scared?  Well, yes.  But it's not decrepitude that has me worried.  I am bothered by the assumptions made about me by strangers in public places.

Like thousands (millions?) of other Americans, I headed to the gym a few weeks ago, at the start of January.  One of the trainers introduced me to the new equipment added during a recent renovation.  I had banged my tailbone on the seat of the cherry red bike I bought myself for Christmas.  My discomfort getting up from the hard seats on the machines troubled the trainer, who repeatedly insisted that I should see a doctor. 

Did I need surgery, a cast, an x-ray, pills, or an injection?  No.  I had a bruise.  "Perhaps it's been a long time since you rode a bicycle?"  suggested the trainer.  "Actually this is my second bike," I told her.  "My first one is a Motobecane Mirage."  Her eyes widened.

By the end of our hour together we had made our way through a circuit of at least fifteen machines.  "Want to do some pushups?"  she asked.  When I did, the trainer fairly crowed, as if I were some sort of rare find.  She had never, she said, seen anyone attempt pushups at my age. 

Is sixty so far gone?  I didn't like the idea.  I liked it still less when I noticed a questionnaire addressed to senior citizens--"members aged sixty and over"--at the gym's check-in desk.  The questionnaire asked how I felt about the grant-funded classes for us oldies and how these classes had improved my quality of life.  Reading it I realized not only that I had I no direct knowledge of these offerings but that, while well intentioned, they utterly lacked appeal.  I found that what I most dreaded as this birthday approached was finding myself relegated to groups consisting only of people my age and older.

Anathema!  No virtual ghetto for me.  Flexing my biceps, I resolved straightaway to attend more Zumba and step aerobics classes and to work those abs until my belly receded and I qualified as a hula dancer.  Still, my defiance left me feeling rather alone and defensive.  Until yesterday.

I had just finished the circuit and was about to put away my workout card when a newspaper clipping prominently displayed on the trainers' desk caught my attention.  It showed a seventy-year-old woman in Florida flexing very prominent biceps as she hoisted a heavily weighted bar.  Reading, I learned that after a bout with pneumonia in 2000 and the loss of much weight this remarkable dame had resolved to strengthen her body.  She had hired a trainer, with plainly visible results. I felt like cheering.

As I was walking away, three young men in their late twenties or early thirties walked up and studied the clipping.  "She's seventy years old and she looks better than I do!" lamented one.  "So why don't you call her?"  asked another.  "I don't go out with seventy-year-olds!" said the first.  "Maybe you should!"  I said, grinning.  After a moment of stunned silence, all three of them laughed uproariously.

No, I'm not proposing that young men regard women of advanced age as sex objects (shades of Harold and Maude).  I do think it's time we revised our stereotypes about people once they pass their sixtieth birthday.  Some of us will be elderly athletes or distinguished authors or artists.  Some of us will be senior statesmen and wise commentators (Daniel Schorr of National Public Radio comes to mind).  Some of us will sicken, but many of us will keep a low profile while remaining in good health and enjoying the wisdom and discernment that the decades have brought us.

Why should people over a certain age be marginalized or dismissed as infirm of mind or body?  Put us to the test.  Our numbers are growing mightily.  And our voices, if only they are heard, can improve the quality of life for other generations to follow in our footsteps.