Barb's Blog

It’s said that humility is an essential part of wisdom, and I fully subscribe to this. After all, the wiser one gets, the more one realizes all that is yet to be known. And the wiser one gets, the more vision one has of the fallibility of everyone, including – and especially – one’s self. Paradoxically, having humility actually garners us more trust from others. I don’t know about you, but I don’t fully trust (or like very much) someone who tries to convey that they know or can do everything. In its own way, humor invites trust, too, and it is also, of course, one of our greatest and most universal coping skills. Think of it: every single culture/society in the world employs it and always has, which says to me that it is an evolutionary asset. To my thinking, humility and humor go hand-in-hand. Truly funny people tap into the goldmine of human frailty and imperfection – of which there is an endless source! – and normalize our waywardness and goofiness as humans. And humble people naturally invite a higher level of trust and comfort. In this way, these two things together are great strengths to have as helpers and influencers. Of course, it’s never appropriate to use humor to belittle or demean who we are helping, and therefore the ‘safest’ place to start using humor with a client is with one’s self. You may have heard the saying, “If you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re missing out on a lot of free entertainment”, and there is no dearth of things we can find about which to tease and laugh at ourselves (also without belittling ourselves). I find laughing at myself to be one of the simplest and earliest ways in which to connect with clients and invite them to begin being authentic with me. It’s also good modeling – a ‘permission slip’, if you will, for them to loosen up on themselves and be able to use humor in this same way to navigate through difficult things. Once in a while I run into someone who seems quite unable to admit to imperfection, taking themselves far too seriously to be willing to chuckle at a mess-up or a weakness they have. I find myself feeling sad for people like that, as it’s a sign that they may be bottling up a whole lot of healing laughter and authenticity. If a client is like this, I think it’s important to gently introduce these two vastly useful commodities, no matter what their problems are, and no matter how severe or trivial their concerns. Because humility and humor are twin, ubiquitous mortal widgets that can be applied in a thousand helpful, enlightening ways, and can help us become – and remain – more humane, more authentic, more hopeful, and more flexible in our journeys toward healing and growth.

There’s a saying I like: “There’s no such thing as other people’s children.” I like it because I believe it’s true. We might consider that our collective duty as adults on the planet is to look after the children ~ all the children. It’s also unconscionable to hold any child accountable for any lack or fault someone might assess on the parents’ part. As a therapist and teacher, I emphasize that blaming parents (which often leads to withholding help) does not lead to solutions; even while we hold parents accountable for their choices, our focus can be on asking for each child’s sake, “What does this child and family need to be healthy and well?” Much longitudinal research has been done to show (as if we couldn’t guess it on our own) that providing all families of newborns with the resources, support, and services they need to be able to feed, clothe, shelter and nurture their child, and to have access to quality medical care and early-childhood education, results in a myriad of positive results: less domestic violence, less physical illness, less mental illness, higher school attendance rates, better grades, higher graduation rates, less delinquency and criminality, more family involvement with neighbors and community, and more – all of which benefit community and society as a whole in various significant ways. No one’s talking about buying families luxury goods, extraneous material things, or Disney tickets. We’re ultimately talking about – in many cases – holding families above the abyss, making it possible and more feasible for them to raise their child in a healthy way, alleviating some stress and some of the grave difficulties that interfere with a child’s optimal development. So aside from the moral and ethical imperative to collectively care for babies and children, it also serves us in a very real, very practical sense to do so, for not only would we ensure more decent lives and a fair chance for less-privileged children, but we would engage in pro-active, preventative measures that benefit the family unit, the social network of that family, the wider community, and society en masse. Our best bet in this regard is to elect people who have this imperative in mind, whose proposals and policies speak to the priority of ensuring that babies and children get what they need, no matter the circumstances. It ultimately saves money, as well as lives. It also saves our hearts.

Aren’t we all in this together? Isn’t this what every major philosophical, spiritual, and scientific endeavor has proffered all though human history?

I like to call empathy “the great connector”. Here’s why: humans are such that, when shown empathy (and its cousin, compassion), they tend to respond to that person with more trust and openness – a sense of ‘safety’, if you will, that their emotional experience is being recognized. There’s a general evolutionary theory about why this is so, which posits, in a nutshell, that way back when we all lived in tribes, empathic response to one another further ensured the tribe’s survival as individuals were looking out for one another’s well-being in this way and thereby able to tend to one another in supportive ways. At any rate, it is true that expressing empathy toward someone else tends to both tamp down the intensity of the emotion they are experiencing, and deepen the rapport, which opens the door further to being able to influence someone. Of course, this can be misused to manipulate or mislead another – but for the sake of this essay, let’s focus on the power of using empathy to build strong connections both personally and professionally, and thereby have relationships that are more collaborative and fruitful. Expressing empathy doesn’t mean you know exactly how someone feels (I never say that to a person, as it can be off-mark and even feel dismissive), but that you, as one human to another, recognize the emotion being conveyed. An additional benefit of expressing empathy is that one sometimes one has the opportunity to broaden another’s ‘repertoire’, if you will, of the variety of human emotions; many people kind of conflate various emotional experiences through the funnel of just one or two general emotions – anger, for instance – which doesn’t accurately reflect the more fine-tuned variance of human emotion. It is said that to be psychologically healthy, we need to be able to identify with the plethora of specific emotions in order to navigate and process them in a healthy way. Empathy is, importantly, to be distinguished from sympathy: sympathy is ‘feeling sorry for’, while empathy is recognizing and reflecting another’s emotion. This is an important distinction, lest one decide to “not show empathy” to another because that other has done something repugnant or is off-putting. But if we want to be effective communicators, helpers, and influencers, expressing empathy is a tool in the toolbox we can’t afford to be without. It also, as a byproduct, builds our own finesse with recognizing emotions in ourselves. It’s free to do, it’s not complicated, and continues to be, to put a hard shine on it, a ‘survival tool’ for the species. Try expressing empathy in a specific way today with someone you love – it can be as simple as “You seem very frustrated”, or “You’re really disappointed in that, it seems”, and see what happens. Practice it often, and notice its immediate and long-term benefits.

The fascinating and profound things that have been researched and discovered about the sources of trauma, what it does to the body and brain, and what it takes to heal from trauma is informing