Theravive

 By Carlton Brown, M.Sc., M.Div., RMFT 

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A man in Austin, Texas, today flew his small plane into an IRS building, killing himself and possibly one person on the ground, damaging the building, sending people to hospital, and traumatizing hundreds of spectators by conjuring images of a repeat of 9/11. Air force jets were scrambled, and the president was notified. Everyone quickly calmed down when they realized it was “only” a suicide.

The one thing this man made clear before he died was his belief that the world had not treated him fairly. He was mad at the tax department, specifically, as well as “big business” and the government in general. At 53, he must have felt like a failure, having lost two previous businesses and at least one previous marriage. Believing that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”, he twisted this usually helpful aphorism into the conclusion that this would be “something different” to try with his life. Feeling that he had explored all the options, he concluded that “violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer”. At some level, he must have believed that he was “answering” the unfairness of the tax department by making people who worked for the tax department suffer. He was being unfair to them as he had felt that they had been unfair to him.

A good study on suicide is Kay Redfield Jamison’s Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, available here. A professor of psychiatry, Jamison also suffers from bipolar affective disorder, a mental illness associated with a higher risk of suicide. She knows whereof she speaks.  

Suicide has been called “a permanent solution to a temporary problem”. When people contemplate suicide, they feel hopeless and helpless. Without resources and without a future, people on the verge of completing suicide reportedly feel a sense of calm, as if they have “solved” their problem with this very narrow and final solution.

People who contemplate suicide are usually depressed. Depression can be part of bipolar disorder as well as an illness unto itself, and is associated with defective thinking. Depressed people make three errors in their thinking: first, they think that they are worthless; second, they think that the world is unfairly punishing them; third, they don’t think that things will ever get better. This man probably had all three of these faulty thoughts, writing most clearly about the second, that he felt that he had been treated unfairly. He certainly didn’t seem to believe that things were going to improve. And he counted his own life as worthless in his plan to right the wrongs that had been done to him.

It is not unusual for people to have suicidal thoughts. Depression in and of itself may even be part of a normal life, a time of lying fallow and resting, perhaps to recover from a trauma or a loss. Matthew Fox called it one of the four roads that we follow from time to time in the course of life. But it isn’t meant to be the main road that we take - not the main course. After a period of depression it is indeed helpful to “do something different” - but not to fly your plane into the government office of your choice. Distraction has been shown to help people recover from depression. Forcing yourself to do a normal routine also helps: “fake it til you make it” is a good mantra to follow. Because if you do manage to distract yourself from your thoughts, if you do “fake it” and go on about life “as if” it is worth living, it will become so again.

It is not unusual to have such thoughts. The time to worry, however, is when you find yourself (or someone you know) beginning to develop plans. Suicidal thoughts + plans = risk, especially if the plan is within the person’s ability to be carried out in the near future. This constitutes an emergency: it’s time to call 911 and get the person to hospital, where someone can distract them until they are able to distract themselves.

Before it becomes an emergency, however, if you find your life becoming a knotted problem from which there seems to be no escape, find a good therapist. Therapists are trained to “open space” and generate additional options - solutions to your problems that perhaps you never thought of. Certainly for this man, there were options besides exacting an eye for an eye from the tax department, in a permanent and fatal solution. It was tragic that he couldn’t see these options.

A great online resource for preventing suicide is here.

 By Carlton Brown, M.Sc., M.Div., RMFT 

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Today was a statutory holiday where I live. We have this thing called Family Day, which I thought was just a Canadian thing but according to Wikipedia is a holiday in South Africa, Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, Arizona, Vanuatu, Vietnam, and part of Australia. Not unlike the postmodern family, no one really seems to know what Family Day is about or agree on whether even to recognize it. The day, just like its namesake, has no “One size fits all.” My one daughter seemed to think that Family Day meant that you were supposed to stay with your family and that if you didn’t then at least you should feel guilty about it. “Happy Family Day, Dad,” she said as she slunk out of the car and into her friend’s house. Robert Beavers in his 1981 Successful Marriage said that guilt was good if it lasted less than five minutes and led to a change of behaviour. No joy here. Rather she reminded me of a couple I saw once. Both had had affairs - but the woman felt justified because she felt more guilty about her affair than her husband did about his. But I encouraged to her go, actually. She is at that age where she is supposed to be leaving my family, and thinking about starting a family of her own. The more time she spends with her friends, the better - and the more time I have for napping, or reading. The other daughter of mine felt that Family Day was an offense, falling, as it does, immediately after Valentine’s Day. “Valentine’s Day for love, and Family Day for what? To remind you of what can happen to you if you have too much love? Yuck!” She called today another name that I will not bother to repeat. But she too used the time to reconcile and reunite with friends. Elizabeth Carter and Monica McGoldrick wrote (1989) The Changing Family Life Cycle to remind us that families are not static. At the very least, they evolve, from couples, to couples with young children, to kids in school, to teenagers, to launching and the empty nest, to older couples and to old age and death. There is wondrous variety to this basic scheme: same-sex couples, with and without children, single parents, never-married singles, two-home families. Each goes through its own stages of expansion and contraction, birth and death. My dictionary defines a family as parents and children living in the same household. They don’t have to be related to each other! The kids could be adopted. The Family Law Act of Ontario defines a parent as someone having a “settled intention” to raise a particular child. More variety. Etymology takes us to the heart of the matter, however: “family” derives from the Latin noun “famula”, meaning “servant” or “slave”. The next time you’re vacuuming or doing a load of never-ending laundry, consider that you belong to the “family” of families. Nor is this a bad thing. I spent most of Family Day doing just that: laundry, vacuuming, cleaning floors, while the rest of my family was out doing their thing. It gave me pleasure to know that they were launching as they should be, that I perhaps had done and was doing my part to create the next generation of families. And after that I took a nap, peacefully.

By Carlton Brown: 

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As Valentine’s Day approaches, you will find me at some point slipping quietly into my favorite florist and reemerging with a large bundle of red roses.  I’ve been doing this every year, without fail, for 30 years now, bringing flowers to the same girl.  The first year, she received a similar bunch of roses from me and my competitor at the time.  For some unknown reason, his roses ended up adorning the local chapel, while mine remained in her bedroom: a life-changing event for her and me.

Valentines Day was begun to honour one or more individuals of the early Christian church, many of whom were martyred.  

One apparently was a priest who defied Roman law and was secretly performing marriages: at the time, only single men could be conscripted into the army and Rome, needing recruits, had put a moratorium on marriages.  This Valentine was executed on February 14, 269 CE.

Another priest called Valentine was arrested for helping Christians - this was at a time when, well, Christians were the guests of honor in the Coliseum (remember “Gladiator” with Russell Crowe?  That sort of guest).  This Valentine was also executed.  But he had a girlfriend, to whom he sent love letters from jail - the first valentines.

Then there was Valentinus of Egypt.  Born around 100 CE, Valentinus became an outspoken and slightly offbeat teacher, who probably studied under a student of Paul and then went his own way, promoting ideas that were interesting but not quite orthodox.  He did move to Rome and became a well known and respected teacher.  Possibly, being offbeat prevented him from being executed: he was too weird to become a bishop, and too much like other Roman philosophers to be martyred.  Lucky guy.

The word “valentinus” means “heathy, or strong”.  The Romans used to say goodbye to one another with “Vale!” - “Be well!”  

So you can see that Valentine’s Day as we celebrate it now probably derives from the first guy, the one who married lovers in secret.  And so we proclaim our love to our romantic partners on this day.

This really bugs my daughter, who is single.  And so she, and her single friends, will be getting together, probably for sushi and Hugh Grant movies, and celebrating “Singles Awareness Day”.  Which I think is creative, a way of celebrating the day as a day of health and strength, and being slightly offbeat, while still surviving and even thriving.

As for me, I’ve ordered my roses, probably more than I should.  But that relates to a story I once heard about a man in the Philippines who paid seven cows for his wife - a ridiculously high price at the time.  No one had ever put out that much for a relationship before.  At first his neighbours thought the guy a bit foolish, certainly strange.  But after awhile they began to wonder if maybe he knew something that they didn’t, maybe his wife was worth seven cows.  They began to treat the woman with deference and respect - perhaps she was descended from royalty.  As time went on the woman began to look more and more like a queen, and the foolish man less and less like a fool.  People tend to live up to the value you place in them.

Whether you are single, coupled or in between, set aside this Valentine’s Day to honour your strengths, your health, the gifts of your loved ones and families, and the benefits of being slightly offbeat.  Vale!