Page 60 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Disaster Relief 29

hard to see a circle without a concept of circularity, I would have trouble
seeing loneliness as a driving force in a person unless I entered the situation
already understanding that gnawing loneliness can drive human beings.
How can we formulate a theory that honors the infinite variety of
interpersonal emotional experience that a particular person may need
in order to profoundly change? More specifically, in the present context,
I want my theory to help me toward a nuanced understanding of any
moment with someone I am trying to help bear great grief, pain, or other
aspects of life. While I don’t want to jump to a predetermined motiva-
tional schema, I also don’t want to have to “reinvent the wheel.” That is, I
don’t want to feel (or pretend to feel) that I have no beliefs about human
behavior in general and about my own patterns in particular. I want a
theory that helps me move toward greater understanding of the interper-
sonal moment, not one that starts with a predetermined explanation or
one that leaves me groping in the dark.
Anyone in a helping profession needs to be able to move back and
forth, between the present clinical moment and a complex and flexible
theory of human motivation. Human beings have certain inherent fun-
damental emotions, but our life experience patterns them differently in
each of us. You and I are both capable of shame. But, maybe very intense,
early taunting has tinged your shame with rage. My shame comes with
a different history, perhaps bringing more guilt than rage in its wake. Of
course, these would be relative, not absolute, differences. For example,
an event that leaves you bereft might remind you of early experiences,
fraught with shame, where you had less than other children. These
defining moments of shame might then easily recruit your rage at life’s
injustice. But I, with my own emotional baggage, might respond with a
different set of feelings. My shame at feeling I now have very little might
come, for me, at the expense of my self-esteem. Given my particular
experiences, my history might predispose me to feel that, once again, I
have let myself down and failed at life.
The theoretical slant I am outlining allows cognition an equal recogni-
tion along with the emotions. How we think and how we feel so mutually
interconnect that sorting them out can occupy much time. I believe I am
best prepared to help people with their painful life experiences if I enter
every interchange with loosely held notions about how loneliness “smells,”
the “taste” of fear, the “texture” of intense shame. These are leads that can
help me orient, but not certainties that prematurely close down my intuitive
understanding. They allow me to honor the tremendous variety of individ-
ual emotional life experience, and their impact on who we each become.