Nathen's Miraculous Escape

One thing I will have to assess in the families I see is possible drug/alcohol abuse, because substance abuse is pervasive, problematic, and interpersonal. One of my texts, Procedures in Marriage and Family Therapy, recommends using “objective” measures such as the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test (25 items), or the MacAndrew Alcoholism Scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (49 items), to give weight to the assessment. However, it also says that there is a correlation of .89 (that’s very high) between answering yes to two or more of the following four questions  and alcohol abuse (p. 47):

1) Have you ever felt you ought to cut down on your drinking?

2)have people annoyed you by criticizing your drinking?

3) Have you ever felt bad or guilty about your drinking?

4) Have you ever had a drink first thing in the morning to steady your nerves or get rid of a hangover (eye opener)?

Also, they list Heilman’s eight symptoms of alcoholism:

1) Thinking or talking a lot about drinking or getting high.

2) Increased tolerance. This is not a sign of health!

3) Drinking or taking a drug in a way that speeds up the onset of its effects.

4) Non-social use.

5) Drug/alcohol starts to seem like a medicine. Thoughts of drug/alcohol immediately upon a stressful event.

6) Blackouts. “How did I get home last night?”

7) Taking care to always have a supply of alcohol/drug.

8) Using more than planned.

Finally, Heilman says that anyone who answers yes to the question “Is your drinking ever different from what you would like it to be?” is very likely suffering from alcoholism (p. 48)

I will start seeing clients this summer, so I’m reading two texts about how to structure my sessions, Procedures in Marriage and Family Therapy, by Brock and Barnard, and Essential Skills in Family Therapy, by Patterson. One of the things I am to assess as a top priority is the possibility of family violence. (I’ll get a whole class on this next year.) It’s almost always perpetrated by a male. According to Patterson, battering is the biggest cause of injury to women. Here is Brock & Barnard’s list of characteristics that can help identify violent men (p. 46):

1) Believes in the traditional home, family, and gender stereotypes

2) Has low self-esteem and may use violence to demonstrate power or adequacy

3) May be sadistic, pathologically jealous, or passive-aggressive

4) Has a Jekyll and Hyde personality, capable of great charm

5) Believes in the moral rightness of his violent behavior even though he may go too far at times

6) Has perpetrated past violent behavior, which includes witnessing, receiving, and committing violent acts, violent acts during childhood; violent acts towards pets or inanimate objects; and has criminal record, long military service, or temper tantrums

7) Indicates alcohol abuse

To this list, Patterson adds preoccupation with weapons or control.

I’ve been tracking my driving and biking mileage since my last birthday, just over six months. I just broke 400 miles on my bike, so I thought I’d figure out my mileage ratio. I’m at 401.8 miles on my bike and 3,283.2 miles on my truck. That’s 1 to 8.17 biking to driving, or 12.24% biking.

That’s pretty good, I think, considering I’m just a commute-cyclist. I drove less than half of the average miles for an American (7,500  in six months, according to WikiAnswers) and biked 37 times the average American miles (using 6.2 billion miles biked in 2001 from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and 285,669,915 people in the US in 2001, according to the GovSpot.com, giving about 11 miles per person per six months, if my math is right.)

I expect my biking to catch up some to my driving, too. I drove to Joshua Tree for Christmas this year, accounting for over 2,000 of my driving miles, and I won’t be making another trip like that for quite a while. Without that trip, I’d be at about 1/3 of my miles biked.

Hmm… maybe next year I’ll track my walking too. That would be cool to know.

My parents forwarded me an email from a family friend, Lauren (musician and poet), who is going off email for six months. She’s concerned about distraction (including in her email the quote “It’s commonly believed and understood that it takes about 4 minutes to recover from any interruption. If the computer dings at you and you look 30 times, that’s 120 minutes of recovery time. That’s the crisis.” —Marsha Egan, Author of Inbox Detox), concern over what seems like addictive behavior, valuing face-to-face or at least voice-to-voice communication, and this article about a study which found that emailing reduced productivity more than pot.

She had a series of questions about it email and her project, which I answered. By email. I think she’s starting on April 14, but if she’s already started,she can read my answers in six months.

April 9, 2010

Dear Nathen,

We are very pleased to inform you that you passed the comprehensive exam. Our standard in grading this exam is high; your work was of a very high quality. Congratulations!

You have worked very hard and you have demonstrated excellent understanding of core course material. We look forward to working with you as you move into your clinical work. In the Beginning Practicum course Dr. Tiffany Brown will continue to inform you about the Advanced Practicum course, about internship options throughout the community, and about orientation dates and plans for beginning at the Center for Family Therapy.

The vast majority of your cohort received a passing score this year. This is a statement of both your individual abilities and the support you give each other.

Again, congratulations.

Deanna Linville, Ph.D., LMFT

CFT Program & Clinical Director

Assistant Professor

Couples and Family Therapy Program

University of Oregon

I’m reading Froma Walsh’s Spiritual Resources in Family Therapy (1st edition) for my Wellness & Spirituality Throughout the Life Cycle class. Here’s a quote:

“Active congregational participation as well as prayer tend to become increasingly important over adulthood. Whereas only 35% of young adults aged 18-29 attend their place of worship weekly, 41% of persons aged 30-49, 46% of those  aged 50-64, and 56% of those over 65 attend weekly.”

That quote is from the 1999 edition of the book, and so those numbers are probably based on a survey conducted in the 1990s. The source is not cited, so I can’t be sure, so take this criticism with a grain of salt. I’m just using this example to point out something that happens a lot with the analysis of age-based research. That is, this presentation makes it sound as if humans attend church more and more as they get older, but these numbers say no such thing.

What these numbers say is that at the time of the survey, 35% of young adults say they are going to their place of worship weekly and that each age group above them at this time show more of that behavior. Each generation has its own characteristics. It may well be that this group of young adults is part of a less church-going generational cohort, which will stay more or less that way as they age. Imagine, for example, that such is the case and the next generation that comes along attends church more often. A survey at that time will show that place-of-worship attendance is relatively high in young adults, drops off in middle age, and then resurges in old age, and many will assume, based on that, that this is the “natural” progression of human church-going behavior.

As far as I know, Walsh is accurate in her analysis, based on information she is not giving. It’s a potential error to be aware of, though, and one often overlooked by researchers in psychology. I’ve noticed it often since reading Strauss & Howe’s Generations. They make the point really well, that we often think that increasing age causes people to become more or less something-or-other–more conservative, say–basing our reasoning on the generational cohorts that are currently alive, but it may just seem that way because of the quirks of our sample.

In order to know, we would need more information than this snapshot. We need multiple surveys conducted over quite a period of time, while different generational cohorts were alive, to get longitudinal information. Does each generation attend church more and more as it ages? Is the difference in church-going between a generation in its young years and that generation in old age greater or less than the difference between that generation and another generation entirely?

On Friday I had my first Wellness & Spirituality Throughout the Life Cycle class in my couples and family therapy program. We had an open discussion of the meaning of spirituality that got pretty tense. I admit that I was pretty confused about what was making things tense–I was not in the clearest of minds, as I’d just taken comps the day before. It did get me thinking about Ken Wilber’s essay in Integral Spirituality about the four meanings of the word spirituality. In it, he says that there are at least four very common ways that people mean that word, and that if the specific meaning is not made clear it can lead to confusing and confused arguments. Here’s my paraphrase of his four common meanings:

1) Any human intelligence, skill, or ability taken to the highest level. Think Einstein’s intellect, Carl Rogers’ empathizing. In Kosmic Consciousness, Wilber mentions Michael Jordan playing basketball as an example of this meaning of spiritual.

2) Spirituality as its own kind of human intelligence, as in James Fowler’s Stages of Faith. Wilber cites Fowler’s stages  as just one example: Humans have a capacity for faith that can progress throughout their lives, from an “undifferentiated faith” at infancy through stages like “mythic-literal faith” and eventually, possibly, to “universalizing faith” as his furthest potential.

3) Spirituality as a state of consciousness, as in meditative states or other meaningful altered states. Also peak experiences.

4) Spirituality as a facet of personality or personality type. People who are very compassionate or loving, for example, might be described as spiritual.

OK, I’m done with my comps exam. It went well, I think. I’ll find out in a couple weeks. I’m already a week into my new term and am starting my reading. Here’s my reading list for the next 9 weeks. Each one of these is a chapter or an article for either Child & Family Assessment, Group Therapy, Wellness & Spirituality Throughout the Life Cycle, or Beginning Practicum.