This is one of my favorite chapters. I think it places a 911 call to our culture to pay attention and to begin to search for real solutions. I’d love to hear from you.
Jamie
CHAPTER EIGHT
What Shall We Do Here?
The first teacher I had in my study of the family constellation work was a German named Heinz Stark. For one year I followed his work in the United States, and I even did some organizational work for him. I always loved the way he would first face a client in a constellation group, look at them, and say in that strong German accent, “What shall we do here?” His query was so simple and non-threatening, so open-ended that we would naturally begin to allow for any and all possibilities to unfold as we entered the work.
So, what shall we do here? These are our children. These are the little ones we guarded, watched over, and nurtured as babes. Every heart should break when one of them dies because they could find no reason to go on living. Every heart should break when we pick up a newspaper and see a lousy three-paragraph article about a child who has shot and killed another child. These are not juvenile delinquents, not wasted remnants of a no-good society. These are our sacred children! In Lakota country, there is a saying common in ceremonies: Mitake Oyasin. It means we are all related. One could say we no longer live in tribes-or one could say the tribe just got larger.
I had a friend who, when she was feeling down or apathetic, would say she had the “why bothers.” Our society has had a bad case of the why bothers for too long. We have to solve the right problems and not dump endless resources into trying to solve the secondary problems that arise from not solving the true problem. But when it comes to adolescent behavior and development, we are like the blind men describing the elephant. One will say it’s a long, flexible appendage; another will say it’s a huge wall with a rough exterior. And while we are all attempting to determine the nature of the beast, we have an ever-growing population of angry, disillusioned young people who thirst for honest guidance.
We have traveled quite a distance in this book, you and me. We’ve wandered around Indian country, and we’ve taken a look at what is left of our mainstream rite of passage rituals. So, what shall we do now? Let’s start talking, and figure it out.
Mental Models and our Current Culture
A few years ago I borrowed my stepson’s car to run an errand. It was after dark and I only had to go to the store. At the time he drove a sporty silver Mazda with heavily-tinted windows. On my way home a patrol car came up behind me with lights flashing. I pulled over and waited until the officer had approached the car before I rolled down the window. I still remember the look on his face when he saw he’d not stopped a punk kid but a forty-plus grandma. I’d not been speeding or doing anything wrong. The officer stumbled awkwardly through checking my license and registration and then mumbled, “Have a good night, Mrs. Lee.” After parenting six young people through the teen years, I knew why he stopped me. He figured I was a young person up to no good.
Peter Senge (1994), a management consultant and author of The Fifth Discipline, said that in order to build a learning organization, in this case a learning society, we must challenge the underlying assumptions or mental models that flow beneath the decisions we make. Mental models, according to Senge, are “deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.” (p.8) He goes on to explain that most often we are not even aware of the mental models that rule our actions. They must be made visible.
What are the cultural and social assumptions underlying our treatment of the young? What do we believe? How have we constructed mental models that push our young out of our care?
Several underlying assumptions are increasingly apparent. One is that being an adolescent has nearly become a crime in our society. The juvenile centers and jails are full of young people. The insurance companies penalize young people for getting a speeding ticket by bumping their insurance rates sky high. We look at the young with suspicion and distrust. A second apparent assumption is that adolescence is in danger of becoming a psychological disorder in our society. When a child does not fit within the tight parameters of “normal,” we diagnose them as disordered rather than widening the parameters to help us understand them. A third assumption flowing under public attitudes is that young people are clueless. We need to take a moment and challenge each of these assumptions with great vigor.
The Criminalization of Youth
One year at my children’s high school, security people were hired to wander the parking lots and to enter any open car to search for drugs or weapons. My son, Tom, said one of his teachers had left his keys in the car and the security guard brought the keys to the teacher during a class. The teacher was outraged that somebody would enter his unlocked car and search his glove box. He claimed it was a violation of his rights.
Periodically, the school goes into what they call lock down and all the students and teachers are required to stay in their rooms while the school is searched. The students have no idea whether the lock down is a true crises situation or a routine search.
We need to guard the rights of our children as we would any other innocent person and protest when they are harassed and invaded as if they are criminals. That officer had no real call to stop me the night I drove the little Mazda. He was just looking for trouble. I’m not naïve about these powerful energies that arise in adolescence, but I do object to making it a crime to be young. I believe that the harassment is worse for adolescent boys than it is for girls, but both are targeted.
What shall we do here? We could take notice in our neighborhoods. We could begin to challenge our own beliefs and assumptions about our young people. Are we automatically suspicious and distrusting of a person simply because he or she is an adolescent? We should resist irrational fears and policies that treat our young as if they are up to no good.
Once when my son was in high school, he came home with a new ID card that he had to scan into a machine at lunch to make sure that he was on campus and not out there up to no good. We had a good laugh because the picture on his ID was not that of my son. Later, a security guard literally cut the pass off of him with a knife, and then sent him to suspension for not wearing his ID. Can you believe that?
Adolescence as a “Disorder”
There is a massive advertising campaign going on to put people on very expensive drugs for social disorder, uneasiness, sleeplessness, and on and on. Patients have literally entered the doctor’s office having made their own diagnosis and practically written their own prescription based on some cute television commercial. My teacher, Heinz Stark, once told me that “All diagnosis is a hypnotic induction.” Remember that we need all of the subtle signs and signals of the body in order to steer a course toward the life we want.
Our health care system demands we have a diagnosis in order to be treated, and so we have millions being diagnosed with one disorder or another. Children are the current targets of many marketing campaigns by the pharmaceutical industry.
A large percentage of the popular media have wholly accepted the idea that depression, ADD, bipolar disorder, and many other disorders are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. This position is quicksand, unsupported by the data, yet we have all bought the advertiser’s message. The human brain, by its chemical nature, is constantly in varying states of balance or imbalance. Skip breakfast and you’re imbalanced. Get only three hours of sleep and you’re imbalanced. Worry about a test and you’re imbalanced. In fact, we are seldom, if ever, in perfect balance.
Peter Breggins, in his book Talking Back to Prozac, (1999)1 points out that all of these powerful psychotropic drugs have been tested on the normal brains of animals. Essentially, their effect is not to cure a chemical imbalance but to cause one. He tells a most surprising story of the original FDA chemical trials of Prozac. Breggins says that the population chosen for the FDA clinical trials was cleared of anyone with serious depression or suicidal tendencies. Additionally, no old people and no young people were included in the study. Additionally, the published results did not include the fifty percent of the tested population who dropped out of the trials because of the severe side effects. The theory that depression and other mental disorders are caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain is being seriously challenged by current research, but the public thinking has already drifted in that direction.
We have what amounts to designer disorders being created to establish a viable market for the drugs that are being designed. These drugs introduce powerful and extremely toxic chemical compounds into the fragile developing brains of our youth. It is a dangerous situation because of the vulnerability of child and parent alike. Having the problem identified as a disorder does something to relieve the guilt parents feel that they have somehow done something wrong. However, it stops all genuine inquiry into the direction of soul building and development.
What can we do here? Just say no. We can begin to take the signals and cues of the body and brain seriously, reading them for meaning and texture and discovering what language of the soul they speak. An agitated, depressed youth is a billboard. His symptoms don’t arise from nowhere; they come from something happening in the life around him. If a teacher bores her students, should we drug the student? Parents, adults, teachers, and the general population have an obligation to educate themselves on the realities of these so-called disorders and discover what is truth and not truth.
Adolescence is not a disorder. It is a natural and potent developmental age that carries the young person to the next place in life. They need guidance, support, resources, and challenges from the Elders around them. They do not need to have those adults place the burden of a troubled society on their young shoulders.
Adolescents are “Clueless”
A third trend that is on the rise is the social assumption that teens are somehow clueless. This damaging image is promoted and pushed on the ridiculous television programs and in the advertising that we have today. Movies with a deeper content like Good Will Hunting or Dead Poet’s Society are rare events.
One night my son and I were having the strangest conversation. He was about ten at the time. He said, “God is everywhere, right, Mom?”
I didn’t know what he was thinking about, so I said, “Yes, as far as I know God is everywhere.”
Then he said, “Well, if God is everywhere and in all things and people, do you think he ever gets crowded?”
His words entranced me. I thought about the underlying constructs of what he was asking. Not only was he thinking about God, he was thinking about the ultimate comfort-or discomfort-of being God.
Young people are not clueless. True, they are given little opportunity to express or explore these higher realms of thought and philosophical inquiry. Like initiation, they hunger for it. They want to know how the universe is built, where they fit in the larger scheme of things and what, if anything, it all means. Is there Good? Is there Evil? Is there some omniscient operator somewhere running this software of human life?
This deep inquiry is an example of the earthbound mortal self trying to extend itself into larger realms, into the unexplored and massive interior of unused brain cells that are the key to unlocking mystery, fostering understanding, and extending the human capacity to create the kind of world we all want. Somehow we’ve very cleverly constructed a negative public relations campaign aimed at adolescents in our society. How could this be?
What shall we do here? We should think and speak well of the young. Rupert Sheldrake (1995), a well-known biologist and researcher, pushes us to understand more fully the power of the “expectancy effect” in scientific research. Study after study indicates that what the scientist expects, he is likely to find. The same is true of parents, teachers, and adult community members who deal with youth. This negative public relations campaign encourages adults to expect very little of our young people. Likewise, it encourages youth to expect very little of themselves-or the adults around them. This is a dangerous attitude that, sadly, produces results. If I expect my adolescent to be clueless, I’m likely to get what I expect.
I once joined a task force for a program called “WISE” (Wise Individualized Senior Experience)2 that creates a way for high school seniors to select, design, and undergo a program of their own making. The program, designed to beat the senior blues, is a mentorship and apprenticeship program that builds a bridge between high school and real life. As I got involved in our local WISE program, it became clear to me that we need more programs like this, and we need to intensify their efforts to encourage students to take charge of their educational pursuit and not sit like robots in a classroom. WISE students have built handcrafted canoes, worked with doctors, EMTs, and fireman. They’ve crafted programs for themselves that bridge the uneasy differences between adolescent youth and the adults of their community. Both have gained from this experience.
We can build more bridges of this type. We can give each young person a chance to stand and be counted, to prove that he or she is not clueless and is, in fact, a deep well of ideas, thoughts, and resourceful thinking. The next time someone rolls his eyes as if he knows all about parenting a teen, simply say, “It’s the most wonderful part of parenting, to watch my young child become a man or woman before my very eyes. A miracle!”
When I entered the Master’s program with St. Mary’s University in Minneapolis, I was stunned by the learning experience they offered me. Rather than follow a set outline of courses, I was encouraged to chart the course of my learning. I was told to “Do no busywork.” For two years I followed a program of my own design, trashing what didn’t fit or work for me, and adjusting my course accordingly. Because I could enter deeply into topics that were of profound interest to me, learning was easy. My courses were not slotted into categories but integrative, all encompassing, taking small side trips into topics that related to my main subjects.
With the internet and the need we have for integrated learning-the push to get the brain to access those marvelous frontal lobes-I see no reason we can’t employ this with students as young as sixteen. If I were asked to redesign the educational system, it would be in this direction. Sadly, programs that allow a student to pursue his or her subjects independently are reserved for the “at risk” student and carry a stigma.
Creating a New Public Relations Campaign for Youth
One day on my counter top I noticed that the large and pretty bowl of tomatoes I’d picked in my garden was swarming with fruit flies and had a bad smell. I gently began pulling the tomatoes out of the bowl and washing them under cold water. They were so beautiful. Sure enough, one large tomato had ripened too quickly and was causing the problem. With this rotten tomato I had to take serious measures (I threw it out), but the rest were still perfect. I also had to recognize that it was my own neglect of the bowl of tomatoes that had caused the problem.
It’s so important not to paint all young people with the dark brush and palette of a few unfortunate or troubled teens. This public relations campaign against youth must be contained and controlled by any or all means possible. We act as Dr. Frankenstein must have reacted when his creature first sat up on the laboratory table; “Oh my God, what is this I have created?”
Much of the problem-solving our society engages in has to do with trying to squash symptoms rather than resolve fundamental cultural issues. Rising rates of teen suicide, gang membership, violent crimes perpetrated by young people, teen pregnancy, overflowing prison and juvenile centers all point a hefty finger at the need for a lasting cultural change. We can’t afford to wait. Every year, the already-staggering amount of resources required by our society to deal with these overwhelming problems increases.
What shall we do here? A few suggestions:
- Allow a natural, strong image of the young person and his or her role in society to emerge and grow stronger.
- Listen more and stop blaming the young for what they did not cause and cannot change alone.
- Recognize our loss of power as parents, and stand again in our place behind and not against the youth.
- Offer respect and honor for their stage of life and not poke fun or ridicule them.
- No longer allow televisions and movies and magazines to create the common image of the “teen werewolf.”
- Give them their right place within our society.
- Challenge our social assumptions and redefine the normally developing energy of the adolescent as magnificent.
- Redesign our educational systems to encourage brain development and not stunt it.
Adolescence is poetically layered with the language of the soul. The questions, Who am I? Where do I belong? and What is the cost of my belonging? lead to deep feelings. Sometimes these feelings disguise themselves as depression, sadness, despair, anger and grandiosity. This is the stuff of soul building, the directional finder that leads the way toward greater integration and wholeness. The call of the higher realms of thought and being are the carrot in front of our cart. It’s important we not judge the disguised appearance of the soul’s deepest movements.
While researching the themes of this book, I stumbled across another book by Pearce called Evolution’s End, (1992)3. Pearce is a thorough researcher and has been a favorite writer of mine over the past decade. In the progression of his books, he has perhaps looked more deeply and holistically at human brain development than most other individuals. After writing The Magical Child (1986), he came back with expanded understanding of what he calls postbiological development-or development beyond biology-and wrote The Magical Child Matures. Evolution’s End extends his understanding even further. Pearce is always interested in what nature had in mind for us. What is her blueprint? What has been coded into us regarding our own human development?
In the book on evolution, Pearce suggested that the brain is not just a processor but a receiver linked into larger bodies of information which he lightly calls “soup sources” that exist beyond the body. With proper growth and development and an adequate push from the environment, the brain can actually extend its neural receptors to receive information from these larger sources of information outside the body. This was the goal of tribal Elders when they took the boy to the mountain and left him there for three days without food or water. They wanted not a compliant, good boy but a young man connected with the ancestors and the realms of spirit and soul.
Initiation and the rite of passage are not only about contributing to the community; they are also about finding the powerful links between this, the mundane world, and the larger realms of spirit, soul, and the greater forces of creation itself. This moment of human development cannot be forced. It can only be prepared for, like tilling the soil in preparation of the later harvest. The opening of adolescence is the beginning of this moment.
A Cultural Resurrection-Reinstating Initiation and A Rite of Passage
I never did build a rite of passage ritual for my daughters. As I’ve explained here, we took off on the trail of our ancestral line through the constellation work, storytelling and initiation. However, I did slowly become alert to what I call “initiatory moments” in my adolescent children. In fact, as I think about it, it is exactly what I do for my clients and workshop participants. I watch for a soul on the move toward some new level and try to support that movement whenever possible.
As parents, our job is to make them face the difficult questions head on. We can push them out when things get a little too soft. We can close the pocketbook quietly and ask them, “What is your plan for getting that car/trip/stereo that you want?” We can tip the balance scale of give and take back in our own direction-give less, ask (or demand) more of them. Additionally, we can get more involved in our communities and neighborhoods and speak up when the negative public relations campaign against youth gets too noisy.
I’ve asked many adults what they think about youth and they say such conflicting things as, “Age envies youth” and “Age idolizes youth.” It seems ironic: if we envy or idolize youth, why do we treat them so badly? Perhaps the truth of this is that we adults are clueless and uninitiated.
What are those dreams and visions that you had as a young person that are as yet unfulfilled? What is your greatest fear, and what could you do to test and challenge that fear? What is it that you long to be doing but are nto? What stops you? When I ask this of a group, I don’t allow them to use time or money as convenient excuses about why they can’t seem to bring about the kind of life they most want.
One of my spiritual teachers says that the only thing we can give to another is our own state. We cannot give what we have not obtained. We need to hunt our own whale. As adults, we need to look inward towards our own soul-building and our own development to find the gaps and fill them in like chinking in a log cabin. We need to discover our own sense of self, our own courage and responsibility. How can we teach accountability when lurking in our purses and pockets are credit cards maxed to their limits? How can we teach restraint and self-discipline when we overeat, over drink, and overuse the resources of this planet? How can we teach compassion and understanding when we so quickly dismiss our own young people? We must complete our own initiation.
In the current state of our culture, it’s as if the young people are to blame. Senge says that a common archetype of organizations is to “shift the blame” to another part of the organization. Have we taken the problem of our own lack of initiation and laid it on the shoulders of our youth? To challenge the assumptions that are breaking down the foundation of our culture and society, we need to look into the mirror to discover what fears and unrealized longings are sunk deep into our own hearts. We need to strip down to a loincloth and a bare stretch of ground and have our own vision quest.
It has been my experience with clients, both young and old, that a step back is easier to make than any step forward. Forward movement takes a tremendous gathering of resources and great courage. When confronted with the possibility of bringing forth our brighter, higher nature, we are faced with a fear that is so universal as to send us running for the shadows again.
Initiation is not an event but an ongoing alchemical process. Each fear, doubt, and pocket of self-hatred must be brought to the surface and burned. We need to be purified and tempered in the fire of experience if we are to gain any strength of soul or self.
Do a personal inventory and be painfully honest with yourself. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Am I able to build and sustain intimate relationships with my partner or other people?
- Am I giving any of my vital energy to old angers, resentments, and relationships that have ended?
- Do I have work that satisfies all parts of me and supports me in the world?
- Do I have patterns that take me to the edge of something brand new only to pull me back again, and keep me in the old way of being?
- Do I have a future vision that extends beyond this week, or this month? What is it?
- Am I able to take the strength of my ancestral line on both my mother and father’s side? Do I respect and honor their fate without childish resentment?
- Am I a victim of circumstances-or do I have a sense of strength, power and choice in my life?
- What do I have to contribute to my culture, and am I doing it?
- Am I able to do my life without addictive support from substances, gambling, shopping, etc.?
If your inventory reveals the uninitiated youth in you, consider that buried within your own soul is an unfinished child or adolescent seeking a way out. We find our way to those lost aspects of our Self by examining our darkest thoughts, our fears, sadness and grief, and the greatest yearning of our own heart. We don’t wander into our stored memories to uproot or remove them or to find whom to blame, but only to complete what may have been left incomplete so that we can re-engage our own initiation. We approach our past with respect and curiosity to discover what those hiding younger parts might want from us. We, essentially, initiate them.
Another revealing technique for self-discovery is to scan the qualities and characteristics in others that irritate and infuriate us. For instance, if your boss is stubborn and must always have her own way, perhaps you are stubborn and insistent on having your own way. If your four-year-old leaves his junk all over and it makes you crazy, see where your own junk is. This simple mirror technique asks, “How am I just like that person who irritates me so much?” It can sometimes be painful when we uncover our own flaws and weaknesses, but it is worth the effort.
Finally, don’t forget to discover and strengthen the parts of you that are vitally alive and burning like warm flames within you. Look to your own creativity, the simple desires, the love of beauty, nature or music that sleeps within. I remember when my daughter had her senior picture taken we pulled my old senior portrait out and were both stunned to discover how we resembled one another. It was most shocking to me because I think of my daughter as pretty and very loveable. This was not a feeling I ever had about myself at that age. I’m not sure why, but I was never enough to myself: not thin enough, smart enough, ambitious enough. It’s a lesson I’m still learning as I continue my own initiation.
When I was in my early twenties I decided to attend a writer’s retreat to see what it felt like to be in the company of writers. I was a closet writer and had been for many years, but I was afraid to test my tender talent before the eyes of real writers. For three days I went to the phone to register for the retreat. I’d lift the receiver only to drop it again in its cradle. It was awful. I was terrified that I’d somehow find the tiny flame of my desire doused by criticism. I spoke harshly to myself saying things like, “Who do I think I am, anyway? What kind of a fool . . .”
The self-torture was terrible. Finally, like the seventh grade me who finally tried out for the play, I made the call and even entered a short story to be critiqued by the experienced writers in the group. I attended the retreat and was stunned (and elated) when the older woman who critiqued my manuscript called me an accomplished writer. And, almost miraculously, for the first time, I believed that about myself.
Initiatory moments require something of us. In all we have explored, the rite of passage must have a test or challenge if we are to win the prize of the initiation. We have to do that thing which scares us, which we think we are incapable of doing, which some nasty voice in our head tells us that we are crazy to even attempt. Go ahead and start that business, take that trip alone, go back to school, or take up that paintbrush. Just do it.
When we have done this, then we may, at last, have something of value to offer our young ones. The care of the young soul, whether it be our own or that of our child, includes supporting them through the anguished periods of darkness without judging harshly-and without automatically thinking that we must be doing something wrong as parents. This is a selfish stance concerned only with our own measurement as parents. If our children are in a dark moment of the soul, it may mean we have done it exactly right. In our deepest fears and longings are our greatest gifts. If we never turn in their direction, the gifts remain undeveloped and languishing. This can only lead to real despair and depression.
When we have attended to our own inner initiation, we could also consider what, in this modern society, is the whale we must hunt? From studying many of the futuristic books that predict the trends of the 21st century, we can see that our children need to be able to think freely with those little-used frontal lobes of the brain. Our children need to see beyond their own small world and to think holistically and systemically in order to better judge the effects of a decision in the moment. They need to be flexible, able to cope with changing economies, changing careers, and a constantly shifting global society. These are the whales that our children (and yes, we ourselves) must hunt.
When the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed during the terrorist attack, my son pointed out to me that the date of the attack was 9-11, the same number that we use to call in an emergency. Tom was already looking for patterns that connect and speculating about what the larger meaning of this date held for our society. He was beginning to hunt his own whale.
