Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [115]
About two hundred years ago, a wealthy young couple lived in this beautiful villa. They had a five-year-old daughter who played in the garden every afternoon. One day, when they called her to dinner, she didn't answer. They looked everywhere but never found her body. They presumed she fell into Lake Como and drowned.
The little statue is of the mother with her hand on her brow, shielding her eyes as she looks over the water, searching for the body of her daughter. That is what the real mother did for the rest of her life, and what the statue mother has done for almost two centuries.
We all suffer. Pain and sorrow find a niche in every household. Most of us do not carry the burdens of Bintu or Joseph, but our lives are not easy. All of us have lost people we love. We have been betrayed or abandoned. We have made serious mistakes and have needed to forgive ourselves. As Wynton Marsalis's grandmother said, "Life has a board for every behind."
In all places and times, people have needed to know how to heal. Ten thousand years ago, a woman whose husband was killed in a hunt for wild game must have wondered, "How can I go on?" Parents who buried their children must have asked themselves, "Will we ever feel happy again?" Perhaps the oldest and most universal question is, How do I get over this?
Just as suffering is universal, so are systems of healing. All cultures have wisdom to offer their own members and the rest of us. This chapter will examine ideas about healing from all over the world and discuss what enables some people, but not others, to heal. It will ask, Why, with tragedy, do some people break like glass while others are tempered into steel? And, Why does suffering brutalize and coarsen some people and ennoble others?
THRIVE
I started the Thrive Project with a group of mental health professionals. We trained mentors from different cultures to be cultural brokers on mental health issues. The project began with ten classes that included everything from explaining the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist to discussing when Americans toilet train their children to describing how to deal with a suicidal person. Mentors educated professionals as well, teaching us how other cultures deal with emotional pain. The mentors then worked with people from their own countries, easing them into our system or helping them in more traditional ways. Therapists supervised and supported their work. The lessons of Thrive pervade this book.
The value of the project was not what we taught the Bosnian, Vietnamese, Kurdish, Russian, and Caribbean mentors, but what they taught us. They spoke honestly about how their cultures perceived our mental health system. They told us about the psychological problems that people from their countries experienced, and they listened to our advice. Often, they politely told us why our advice wouldn't apply.
The mentors defined their roles broadly. They were action-oriented and they didn't wear watches. If their clients were stressed by hungry children, rather than discussing stress management theory, the mentors drove them to the grocery store. A traditional supervisor might say that these mentors didn't have good boundaries. But I came to see it differently. The mentors were not compartmentalized the way we Americans are. They didn't make distinctions between clients and friends, between professional and nonprofessional relationships. By their behavior they said, all of us humans need each other's help.
Early on, I noticed that the Thrive mentors who were the least like mental health professionals were the most popular with their own people. The ones who acted the most like us were not in great demand. What the busiest mentors had in common was that they were holistic. For example, once when I chided a Sudanese caseworker for taking calls at night, he said to me, "You don't understand. All the Sudanese people are my family. I will help them all day and all night. It is not a job to me. It is my life."
When our Vietnamese