The Distress Line vs. The Big Lie

[I worked on a crisis line for over twelve years. The next couple of posts are about a few things I've learned from that experience --db]

In Distress Line training, we learn things in chunks: Loss.  Domestic violence. Addictions. Suicide. Senior’s abuse.

In reality, many of these issues have a lot of common threads. Things that apply to one type of issue can also apply to others.

For example, You can use ambivalence on Domestic Violence calls. It’s still about avoiding pain, after all, the only difference is instead of being trapped between life or death, the caller is being pulled between staying and leaving, stretched between the pain of holding on and the fear of letting go.

You can apply the Cycle of Abuse to addictions calls. What is addiction after all, but a one-person cycle of abuse? There’s the shame of using followed by the promise to never to it again, the commitment that this time things will be different, even as the pressure to use again starts to build. Over time, the good times disappear as the substance or addictive behavior consumes more and more of the person’s life, it takes more and more of the substance to provide the addict with the same ‘high’; use becomes more frequent; the addict finds him or herself powerless to stop on his or her own.

Don’t believe me? Join an exercise class.

Ever try to hold a plank position for an extended period of time in a bootcamp, pilates session or yoga class? What goes through your mind? I can’t do this any longer (hopelessness). You want to be doing anything other than holding this position, but you feel completely at the mercy of this sadistic instructor who won’t let you rest (helplessness).  You feel your arms burning (pain) and you find yourself torn between allowing yourself to collapse and quit or forcing yourself to keep going (ambivalence). There might thirty other people in the class, many of them going through the same inner struggle, but none of it means anything to you. In your suffering, you are all alone (perceived isolation).

The Big Lie crisis tells us is that we’re alone in our suffering. The truth we learn from answering the Distress Line is that crisis is actually something that happens to us all. Instead of dividing us, it‘s something that brings us together

Why does all this matter? Why is it important to start making these connections?

Because as we do, we stop seeing calls in terms of risk assessments and issues and start seeing the people behind them.  We start to notice how universal crisis is to the human experience, We see the way we’re connected and the way we’re united by losses large and small and the way they us to make the choice between giving up and growing up.

In short, it helps us see ourselves and our callers as equals.

One of the dangers of the Distress Line is that it has a way of feeding both our pride and our inner control freak. We would never say it out loud, of course, but as we see our effectiveness improve, it’s easy to start seeing ourselves as better than our callers, maybe even better than some of the people in our personal lives. We might think that because we know how grief works, how domestic violence relationships develop, or how to pick up on suicide cues that we‘re immune to being touched by these issues outside the call centre.

Understanding that crisis touches everybody keeps us grounded. Remembering that we are no better or worse than our callers keeps us humble, makes us more effective on the lines, and builds our own resilience so we are better able to face the inevitable crises in our own lives no matter how shocking our unexpected.

Once we understand that, we can truly start to make a difference.

A Distress Line Call Is Like A Wedding

[I worked on a crisis line for over twelve years. The next couple of posts are about a few things I've learned from that experience --db]

A Distress Line call is like a wedding.

Every wedding is different. There are small, simple weddings and elaborate ones. There are traditional church weddings and casual backyard barbecues. Some run smoothly and some are complete messes.

It’s sometimes helpful to think of a Distress Line call as a wedding. Just like a wedding some things absolutely need to be there. Some things are optional but if you have them they add a lot to make that Special Day even more special. Some things are the guests that you don’t really want to invite but they have to be there because not inviting them would cause more headaches down the road (I’m looking at you, Risk Assessments)

Learning to be a Distress Line Listener is learning to become a Wedding Planner. We explore what Listeners want, what they need, and we use our skills to customize something that works to the best of our ability.

And like a wedding planner, we have no control of how things turn out ten years, ten months, ten weeks, ten days, or even ten minutes down the road. We do our job to the best of our ability and let the rest go.

Something else struck me.

But a wedding isn’t a marriage.

A marriage is more subtle. You can have a bare-bones wedding and still have a fantastic marriage. You can have the most beautiful wedding in the world and the marriage can still be lacking something.

In some ways, a Distress Line call is a wedding AND a marriage. The wedding is the technical elements of the call: the risk assessments, the info skills, the following of procedure. Those things make a difference.

After all, everyone wants a good wedding. Everyone wants their special day to be…well, special.

At heart though, a Distress Line call is deeper than those pieces. At it’s core, a Distress Line call is a marriage, the union of GEENAand IPP. GEENA are the five qualities we try to bring to each call: genunine, empathy, empowering, non-judgemental, and assertive). IPP is an acronym about how we focus the call (Immediacy, personalize, prioritize). The better we can bring those qualities together with that focus, the better your calls will be.

And like a marriage, working with GEENA and IPP is a constant process.

The better your marriage though, the better your calls will be. Once you become comfortable with the pieces that go into a Distress Line call--the listening skills, the procedures and policies, knowing where everything is--it frees you up to start working on GEENA and IPP

We can work on these skills away from the lines. Every moment is a chance to work on getting better at recognizing the answers to questions: What makes this moment unique? What is the most important thing going on right now?

Each day we can move towards becoming more authentic and empathetic. We keep learning to set boundaries. We become less controlling and judgmental.

We learn to be better partners.

And through that we start to not just make a difference, but be a difference, on the lines and in our own lives.

In The Interim

So.

I'm back from the monastery.

I'm not ready to post about leaving yet.

But soon. Someday.

More to come.

The World And Everything In It

Everything flows.

We're all dancing, all the time.

Our partners?

The world, chico, and everything in it

Buddhists In Disguise?

Here at the monastery, I've been thinking about the Transformers a lot lately.

The comics, not the movies, and I've especially been thinking about them in the context of Buddhism.

Buddhism is fueled by the idea of change, of impermanence. It was born as a response to the inevitable human conditions of old age, sickness, and death.

Transformers are less vulnerable to those conditions. Individual Cybertronians measure their years in the millions. Parts can be replaced, fallen friends rebuilt.

In that context, how possible for them is any lasting change? Less bound by the positive and negative feedback of irreversible consequences, what motivation is there for real growth, for permanently ceasing hostilities, for Megatron to permanently change his ways, for the Autobots to break their dependence on Optimus Prime to come back yet again to save them, for Starscream to stop wash-rinse-repeating his cycle from ambition to self-destruction, for Hot Rod to mature and temper his recklessness?

The Transformers' situation is practically a meta-comment on comic book characters in general.

Consider Spider-Man. For over fifty years his life has been a never-ending barrage of villains, clones, costume changes, secret wars, deaths, rebirths, alternate timelines, crossovers, team-ups, and World Shaking Events...only to be eternally, inexorably reeled back by the slow gravity of the status-quo.

What would that do to a being, do you think?

Pain

"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."

-Fake Buddha Quote

"Everybody hurts sometime"

-REM

I don't like suffering.

Since I practice Buddhism, you probably guessed that already. Here's something I'm even more ashamed to admit:

I don't like pain either.

I hate it. Not only do I hate being in pain myself,  I also hate to see others hurting.

It's fair to say that my particular brain dislikes pain much much more than it dislikes suffering. Certainly, it will go to great lengths to avoid it.

Having this kind of brain is normal, and it's also a creator of problems.

A brain that wants freedom from pain more than freedom from suffering makes short-sighted, selfish and sometimes counterproductive or even destructive choices. As someone with one of those brains, I get the logic behind it: Who cares about suffering? What does suffering matter so long as we don't FEEL the suffering?

 In other words, our confused mind mistakenly believes that "not hurting" equals "not being hurt."

And so it looks for ways to numb any pain, to bury past pain, and to ward off any potential future discomfort. It chases anything that might help. The obvious targets are sex, drugs, fame or wealth. But there are others, and some are even more insidious for their very social acceptability. Work. Stability. The Perfect Family. Health and/or exercise. Justice.  Making a Difference. Fine things to strive for or achieve...so long as we don't expect them to provide us with something they can't give--immunity to pain.

It pushes people away, then pulls them back, trying to find the perfect distance. It meticulously dissects the past. It worries about and tries to control every aspect of the future. It Keeps Busy.

It lies to others or makes promises it can't keep. It guards how it is really feeling to avoid hurting others. It keeps silent when speaking an uncomfortable truth might be necessary. It tries to solve others' problems so they won't feel pain anymore whether they asked for help or not. It can't bear to hear about others' hurt so it refuses to let them tell us about it. It changes the subject, or it changes the channel.

In its darkest moments, it envies those that seem able to shrug off pain or who seem to be able to do these things without feeling badly about them. It might recognize that those people are damaged, but from its perspective, those people are also not hurting, and not hurting is always the number one priority. Why can't you be more like that? it whispers. Whether the pain belongs to you or others, wouldn't it be nice to be free from caring about hurt?

I know my brain works this way.

I can't get too upset. It's doing its best to protect me, and for that, I'm grateful.  My happiness and health is its utmost concern. I'm moved by its devotion.

Plus, let's face it.  Pain-avoidance isn't a totally unreasonable strategy.  It might even work sometimes. There are situations where such an approach is absolutely necessary. Certainly, I'm glad my brain speaks up when half-awake me is about to stick my hand in the wood stove to fiddle with the kindling.

That said, for the most part, pain-avoidance isn't a sustainable long term strategy. Sometimes what we're using to kill the pain stops working, or we need more and more of it to have the same effect or we can't get it anymore or it starts having negative side effects. Sometimes our bodies fail us or more and more of the people around us start making choices of their own.

Sometimes it causes more hurt, for ourselves, yes, and also for those we care about most, and whether we intended to or not, that hurt is there and that hurt is real.

More importantly, it goes against who many of us aspire to be. I might have this type of brain, but I don't have to choose that type of life. None of us do.

I've read a couple books on anxiety. In them, the authors maintained that avoiding fear or anxiety only results in us being afraid or anxious about more things until we are boxed in by our own terror. They advocated something called "peak and pass," where we allow ourselves to experience our fears in a safe situation, and notice how they go away on their own. It sounds like a similar principle to what we do in meditation, but since I'm neither a psychologist nor a certified meditation instructor, that's speculation on my part.

In any case, I'm not writing anything new here. Few people enjoy uninvited pain, and almost everyone recognizes that pain is sometimes inevitable. I'm also sure most of us have had an experience where trying to avoid hurt caused us and/or those around us greater pain down the road. Furthermore, even as children, most of us have been taught--in theory, at least--the importance of being able to face up to painful things.

So perhaps there's a bigger question being raised here. It's not a question that I know the answer to, but I'm hoping that asking it and leaving it for all will somehow be of value. Because if it's true that pain is inevitable, and it is equally true that suffering is optional...well, it would be a handy thing to know how to make a distinction between the two, would it not? Certainly I've confused one for the other a time or two.

Put another way, boxing trainer Teddy Atlas said that to be successful a fighter "...has to know the difference between the truth and a lie. The lie is thinking that submission is an acceptable option. The truth is that if you give up, afterward you'll realize that any of those punches that you thought you couldn't deal with, or those rough moments you didn't think you would make it through were just moments."

So what helps us make that distinction?   How do we learn to distinguish between true suffering and the merely painful? Is knowing the difference even that important?

 Where, among all these 'just moments,' can we find the truth?

Just Like The Movies

"It is normal for a man, whilst sailing and observing the shore, to think that the shore is moving instead of the boat but, should he look carefully, he will find that it is the boat that is doing the actual moving: in the same way as this, it is because man observes everything from a mistaken viewpoint of his body and mind that he comes to the conclusion that they are eternal however, should he learn to observe them correctly, as a result of penetrating truth, he will discover that no form whatsoever attaches itself substantially to anything."

-Dogen, Genjo-Koan

"Yeah, It was but a moment

Yeah, Wonder where it all went"

-Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Just Like In The Movies

When I was four or five years old, at a friend's birthday party, I saw my first movie. It was magnificent! There were whirs and noises, a light at the front, and on top, two spinning wheels. It wasn't until an adult tapped me on the shoulder and directed my attention to the screen behind me where three ducklings were swimming after their mother into the sunset that I understood my mistake: I'd been watching the projector the whole time.

I sometimes wonder what Dogen, the thirteenth century Japanese monk credited as the person behind our specific Zen sect would think about the movies. Having read a lot of his work lately, I imagine it might go something like this:

"A person might say, "that movie was so realistic," while another says "it's only a movie" and that movies have nothing to do with real life. Such people are chumps. Ha! I pity the fools. Movies are not like reality, and movies are not like not-reality. A person in real life watches a movie, and a person also watches a movie in real life. People are real; movies are real; real life is real. Thus, while watching a movie is real life, real life is also watching the movie. It is also true that people are not real, movies are not real, and real life is not real."

Imaginary-Dogen raises a good point, but I'm not going there for now. I'm also not going to talk about the differences between life and movies, such as life's tendency to leave in the boring, difficult parts instead of condensing them into an inspiring montage set to an ass-kicking rock song. Instead, I'm going to talk about a couple things a think movies can teach us.

1. Nothing in a movie is real.  At the same time, everything we see and experience is due to countless people, many of whom we don't actually see.

The characters are actors pretending to be someone they aren't, delivering lines that another person wrote, wearing costumes someone else designed, sometimes enhanced with computer technology that means they are often performing with things that are not actually in front of the camera with them.

But is that so different from real life? We wear clothes other people made. We travel in vehicles that were invented, designed, and built by multitudes of others. The people we see are products of their parents genetics, mixed with their social upbringing. Even some of our most cherished ideas and favorite spoken lines and catchphrases...so many of those things we learned with others.

We think we're the stars of our own story, but there is much more than what we see in front of us.

2. Commitment

Even though movies are not real, the people making them treat them as if they are. Even if movies are simple entertainment, movie workers devote themselves to as though it were the most serious thing on Earth. Good actors, good writers, good directors, good make-up or special effects artists...all of them devote 100% to their work even if the thing they are working on is--in their opinion--stupid, pointless, boring, or unbelievable. Robert Downey Jr. doesn't look at the camera and go: "Look at me! I'm a-pretendin' to be a Super Hero!" Whether they are saving the world from aliens, involving themselves in the world's most improbable love story, growing space-potatoes on Mars, none of them are winking at the audience going, "Can you believe this here bullshit?"

But maybe my five year old self had the best lesson of all: Look at the projector, not the projection.

When things happen to us in our lives, our brains interpret those things, come up with a story about them, and very often we act on the story instead of the thing that actually happened. We forget about our brain's involvement.

Sometimes it's valuable to look at that brain and notice those stories.

When I find myself getting frustrated doing my taxes, instead of thinking the problem is the tax forms or the computer or the son-of-a-bitch government, I can take a look at that frustration. Maybe I'll notice that frustration is hiding something else--the fear of not having enough, the fear of doing things wrong, the fear of being asked for more than I believe I can afford to give.

When I find myself frustrated with the demands of monastery life, instead of thinking the problem is the schedule or the monks or my own inability to find out what people want and to deliver it to them perfectly, I can take a look at that. Maybe I'll notice that frustration is hiding something else--the fear of not having enough, the fear of doing things wrong, the fear of being asked for more than I believe I can afford to give.

Maybe I'll notice that whether I'm dealing with taxes, other people, or situations I feel beyond my control--even if they seem vastly different for one another--there are some common themes in my brain.

This doesn't need to just apply to external things like people and situations. Sometimes even my own internal reactions and behavior are based on a story that I am too distracted to notice.

For example, during an awkward moment at breakfast, instead of wondering whether the self-deprecating joke that springs to my lips is funny enough, maybe I could notice instead what combination of feeling and circumstance leads me to feeling the need to make a joke in the first place.

I can only write for myself, but what I notice when I look, is that often behind my actions, there is an impulse or plan.

When I look behind that plan or impulse, I find a thought or a belief about myself or about the way the world is or should be.

If I look behind that, then I frequently notice a feeling, often one that is barely perceptible.

And behind that?

Well. That's the question, isn't it? I don't know if I can give an answer--after all, I promised earlier to only write about my self.

Our lives are not about our stories. The beginning, middle, and end is not nearly as important as the thing that is happening right now, right in front of us. Right here, in our personal theatre of the mind.