Wisdom Through Experience

By Richard W. Blumberg

DR. BLUMBERG HAS LOOKED BACK OVER HIS PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCES AND EXTRACTED HIS "RULES OF THE ROAD" OR WISDOM FOR LIVING. HE HAS ORGANIZED HIS THOUGHTS AROUND COMMON ISSUES SUCH AS OUR TENDENCY TO SEEK PERFECTION, TO WANT TO DISTORT REALITY TO COMPLY WITH OUR DESIRES, AND TO SEEK SECURITY IN GOING ALONG WITH THE TIDE OF GENERAL OPINION, EVEN WHEN WE SUSPECT IT IS WRONG. HE ALSO EXAMINES THE RELATIONSHIPS WE HAVE WITH SIGNIFICANT OTHERS, INCLUDING OUR PARENTS, BOSSES, SPOUSES AND FRIENDS. THROUGHOUT DR. BLUMBERG EMPHASIZES THE IMPORTANCE OF OUR EXPERIENCE, AND BEING OPEN TO IT, AS A MEANS OF THREADING A MEANINGFUL COURSE IN OUR LIVES AND ACHIEVING WISDOM. HE CONCLUDES WITH HIS THOUGHTS ON THE VALUE OF NATURE AND THE ARTS IN ENRICHING OUR EXPERIENCES, AND LEADING TO MORE MEANINGFUL LIVES.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 17, 2005
• ISBN: 9781468522587

Richard W. Blumberg

Dr. Blumberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1969, and went on to spend five years as a clinical psychologist in the U.S. Army. His internship was at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, California, and he was later stationed in San Antonio, Texas, assigned as an instructor at the Medical Field Service School. The rest of his professional career was with the Veterans Administration Hospital System, and he retired as Chief of the Psychology Service at the VA Medical Center in Miami, Florida. Dr. Blumberg has recently published another book entitled WISDOM THROUGH EXPERIENCE, in which he looks at the interpersonal lessons learned from his years as a psychologist, and the importance of being open to life's experiences and integrating them into one's personal philosophy.

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© 2005 Richard W. Blumberg, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 10/10/05

ISBN: 1-4208-9042-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-2258-7(e)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Introduction

Psychotherapy as Education

The Wisdom of the Ages

(in 30 years or less!)

Enriching our Experience

Epilogue

About the Author

Introduction

Until recently I never even thought of writing a book. Frankly, I didn’t think I had anything important enough to say to warrant writing a book. Why the change? I surely don’t feel that I have all the answers, or any better answers than anybody else. But over some three decades of clinical practice, I realized that my patients and I seemed to profit significantly from our discussions. In those discussions I noticed that I often repeated the same words and phrases at seemingly crucial points, and that these phrases seemed very helpful at those junctures. I found myself repeating these phrases in casual conversations with friends and in those inner discussions with myself when I encountered difficult situations in my own life. A certain set of truths, or rules of the road seemed to be emerging. Accepting and applying those truths seemed to help a lot in overcoming the inevitable bumps along the way.

As I discuss these truths, a lot of you may think that this is all old hat. These are the things that philosophers, and perhaps even your mother, have been saying for years. I remember a favorite anecdote of mine to illustrate the point. When I was in graduate school, my father, who was a truck driver, would often ask me just what it is that psychotherapists do. I would do my best to explain this in lay terms. After thinking for a moment, he would invariably respond Well, bartenders do that for free. That’s probably true, and I’m glad that it is. I wish more parents, teachers and, yes, enlightened bartenders too, would talk more about the things that trouble us. But I suspect we need professional counselors and therapists because this does not always happen. I think now it might be worthwhile to repeat these things over again in one place, at one time, if only to reinforce them.

In our conversations, I often had the sense that I was helping my patients to see things that they had overlooked, or at least to see things in a perspective that they had not adopted on their own. Often I also had the sense that they were helping me to do the same. At first that made me uneasy. In graduate school I had gotten the idea that the doctor was to lead, and the patient to follow. Later on, I realized that it was the process of seeking a workable truth together that really made psychotherapy worthwhile, and that it wasn’t always necessary to lead. A very dramatic moment brought this home to me some years ago. One of the last groups of patients that I was to work with in my professional career turned out to be AIDS patients, a diagnosis which of course was unknown when I was in training. It was for me a great challenge to try and help very young people cope with the prospect of an early death. One day, in hoping to normalize the experience, I drew on an old cultural metaphor and said to my patient that after all, I could be hit by a bus on my way out of the building tonight. After a brief moment my patient looked up with utter pathos and said, Yes, but you don’t see any bus right now–I always see the bus right in front of me, staring me down. There was a long silent moment. I know that I was changed much more in that moment that he was, and I will always be thankful to him for that.

I also have another reason to try and put my ideas on paper now. The older I get, the more I tend to feel that the same bumps in the road that led my patients and me to have our discussions are the same bumps that cause so much difficulty for society in general. I often find myself worrying that society is heading in the wrong direction, and making so many of the same mistakes that I have struggled with over the years. It may be asking too much to expect society in general to confront the same issues I have long dealt with, but I must confess that that concern is part of my motivation in writing this book. It would be less than honest to omit saying this.

I have no expectation whatever that reading this will bring anyone to instant mental health, or forestall the need for counseling or professional help when it is needed. My hope is that it will briefly focus our attention on what I have come to think of as some universal truths that may help us deal with life more effectively and graciously. The reader will notice that I begin by sharing some of my observations on the topic of psychotherapy. Although many of the ideas that I write about derive from my experiences in conducting therapy over the length of my professional career, that is not the main reason I share my ideas about it at the beginning. Nor am I trying to push it as a professional endeavor, or increase its use among the public at large. Rather, I am trying to reconceptualize it and get people to stop thinking of it as something for the sick and disturbed, and see it as an educational tool that holds great promise in today’s world. Many of the same procedures used in psychotherapy can be applied to education in the best, most meaningful and relevant sense. Learning about ourselves and the way we fit into the world around us is probably the most valuable kind of learning that can take place. Unfortunately, it is currently the most underrated, not to say most controversial learning as well.

As you might guess by now, I dedicate this book to all the people who have sat with me in my office over the years and tried to make sense of some very difficult issues. My hope is that they have been helped at least as much, and maybe a little bit more, than me.

Psychotherapy as Education

I read in my local paper something last week that distressed me very much. It was a report that today’s all volunteer military forces returning from combat overseas are rarely using the counseling services that are provided for them to help in handling the stresses of combat duty. It distressed me because I realized that in the nearly four decades since I began my practice in the military, nothing much has changed. There is of course a general avoidance of mental health issues, much less treatment, in the population at large, but this is exacerbated in the military, with its emphasis on toughness and its highly authoritarian organization. I remember being very surprised one day early in my internship at an Army counseling center. A young officer had presented himself for treatment of anxiety and depression. His symptoms and the circumstances surrounding them were not unusual, but much of his distress was centered on his conviction that his career would suffer greatly by the mere fact of his making our appointment. I did my best to reassure him that my notes would be written in a way to minimize any potential damage to his standing with his commanders, but he could not be consoled. He was convinced that he had jeopardized his career. I guess the same concerns still exist, and we will never know the ultimate cost to people who avoid asking for help because of fear of professional or personal stigma.

We have two very different ways of conceptualizing psychotherapy in our society. One is as an outgrowth of general education, and in particular the discipline of philosophy. The other is a direct outgrowth of medicine, and was stimulated by a need to influence and cure very faulty beliefs about ourselves and to correct very faulty behaviors. It is no accident that psychologists study long and hard and get a Ph.D., whereas psychiatrists study long and hard and get an M.D. Both do psychotherapy and help people to understand and help themselves, but they start from two rather different conceptual models. For better or worse, the medical model has become more pervasive in our culture for a number of reasons. I suspect that insurance coverage factors in somewhere, but other reasons exist. One negative side effect of this of course is that people who seek help within the medical model must be sick. We never say that so and so acts strangely or gets too nervous to fly on an airplane because of faulty learning in his early years; we say he or she has a problem or illness. For some reason that I don’t understand, illness sometimes takes on weird social connotations. I can remember as a child being warned never to mention that my great aunt had cancer. I could say that she was sick, and not doing well, but never to mention the C word. Years later I encountered the same attitude toward my AIDS patients. I could understand better the latter reaction, because of HIV’s association with sex and drug abuse, but I have never been able to understand the stigma that having cancer once carried.

I wish that all self knowledge, and all attempts to influence or correct it, or expand it in new directions, could be firmly established as an educational enterprise. Of course some severe mental illnesses that are firmly based on chemical or neurological bases would remain within the medical province. I also know it is not always easy to separate organic problems from the purely functional, but the benefits would be great. In particular, the stigma of illness could be avoided, and the whole process would seem less threatening. We could study our beliefs and personalities, and the ways in which we attempt to deal with the world, in much the same way as we study geography or mathematics. We could try to normalize self knowledge and the methods to discern it, and take away its sting. Actually, I have read that there have been some attempts to do this. Some years ago there was, and probably still is in some places, an attempt to teach values clarification in the classroom. I thought this was a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, some very conservative people feel that self- knowledge is a highly controversial thing, and that it should be left to the family and to the church. I would welcome that it were, but so much of what I see going on around me in the world today makes me think that something is getting lost along the way. It seems that there is such a fear of any attempt at self-knowledge that it is often neglected completely. This seems more true today than it was some decades ago.

I still remember with some horror an incident that occurred very early in my career. I had gotten a job in a large, newly built general hospital. No patients had yet been admitted, for the hospital was not yet formally open, but staff were being hired and trained for their particular job settings.

At that time, (early 1970’s) it was quite common for large institutions that dealt with the public to do what was often called sensitivity training for their staff. It was, at its best, an attempt to get staff to look at their feelings and reactions to people and situations, and to learn how they might be perceived by others, intentionally or not. The hope was that by knowing this, we might be able to adjust ourselves better to others in a variety of situations, and develop better relations with others, to everyone’s benefit. During my training, I had been exposed to this method of teaching and then trained to be a group facilitator myself. I had never found it to be terribly threatening, and indeed, I felt it had been of considerable help to me, both professionally and personally. I also learned that some people were initially threatened by this however, and that usually they would become more comfortable as they saw what was involved and the benefits that usually followed. The chief of one of the larger professional services of the hospital had asked my boss, the Chief of Psychology, to provide this training for her service. It was a large service, so it was decided that each training group would consist of about 15 people at a time. Another staff psychologist and I would spend a few days with each group.

The other staff psychologist was much senior to me–a kindly older gentlemen with a soft and caring demeanor. He took much pride in being a client centered therapist, and indeed he made Carl Rogers look aggressive. (Rogers was the founder of the client centered movement in psychology, and was famous for his non-directive, non-intrusive manner.) On the first day of our training we gathered in a comfortable room with the obligatory coffee and doughnuts. My colleague was the designated leader and I the assistant. With infinite care and gentleness he explained that it would be a good idea if we all got to know each other a little better. Toward that end he suggested that we arrange our chairs in a circle, and take turns in telling our first names, a little of our background, why we chose