DHHS CONFERENCE, 2011

DHHS CONFERENCE, 2011                        HANDOUT                                                               1

WORKSHOP:  Being Authentic:   It’s a Balancing Act

PRESENTER:  Dr. Candace Cole-McCrea

An enormous amount of research stresses that the quality of our interaction with persons strongly affects present and future quality of life for them as well as for ourselves.  This workshop focuses on how to maximize qualities in our interactions which are most likely to impact interpersonal relationships in a way that demonstrates our humanness, that maximizes potential, that teaches and shares authenticity.

  I have been very impacted by Gandhi’s statement that we often confuse means with ends.  I propose that we have confused the means (effective communication skills to change behaviors) with the ends (authentic relationship building).    Symptoms of confusing the means with ends have been blamed on many variables other than the quality of  the relationship, most usually personal characteristics of the persons we serve.   

The symptoms I propose as a confusion of means and ends are symptoms with which we have all struggled and succumbed at some points in our careers.  We all know it can be highly stressful to work with those who suffer, whose lives never seem to “improve”.  We may identify, wish to “make things right”, fear for ourselves or our own loved ones, or feel a sense of helplessness.   People we try to help may project intense fear and dependency, which may challenge professional boundaries.  We may experience “burn-out” or compassion fatigue, be vicariously victimized by the stories we hear, or become enmeshed, overinvolved or cold and distant.  Depression and grief can haunt us.  To save ourselves, we can become “clinical”….to do so is to have lost our way.

I offer the following poem by Birger Sellin, a person who lives a marginalized life, to bring us to a place of remembering what we are here for.

1.  Really understanding is an important step seeing how

Things work       

                Just why people do as they do

                Perhaps do things for sensible reasons

                Do what is right

                But how can a person really know

                What a sensible reason is            

                How can a person know               

                How things work

 Dr. Candace Cole-McCrea—Authenticity --2

                If he is shut out of society

                And doesn’t know important words properly

                All on his own

                He puts together wonderful explanations for himself

                Totally crazy rough hewn answers

                Buckets full of garbage

                Just to get some understanding is my aim

                Understanding and human experience

                I’ve rediscovered a burning hunger for knowledge from

                                Understanding

                A hunger for the ideal right conduct

                A passionate desire

                To be one with people who know

                To be one with the ordinary people who lead lives without

                                Any confusion

                Just like a valuable essential respected other person like a

                                Person with dignity

                And beings like others

                Like sweet important children who are loved by everybody

                Although they do really silly things

                Like a simple really important wonderful being a child

                                Chosen in the world

                To lead a happy life resolutely in joy

                Like anybody else

Dr. Candace Cole-McCrea—Authenticity--3

Like a simple person functioning okay

From:  I don’t Want to Be Inside Me Anymore  Birger Sellin, Basic Books. 1995

 

HOW DO WE SHARE LIFE WITH THIS MAN?  HOW DO WE BECOME MORE THAN ‘THE OTHER’ TO HIM?  HOW DO WE SHARE OUR MINDS WITH EACH OTHER?  HOW DO WE LIVE INCLUSION AS MORE THAN A PRACTICAL, MECHANICAL, LEGAL DEFINITION?

What happens if we surrender the god of professional behavior:  friendliness with detachment?  Pseudo warmth with barriers?  How can we keep needed boundaries and still reach through the mazes of human experience to reach and hold another?  Has our professional ideal really served us as ideal or have we simply condemned those who could not reach us across the barriers and hurdles we put in their way?  Is there another way?

HOW DO WE BECOME AUTHENTIC?  HOW DO WE SHARE AUTHENTICITY?

1. Free Choice.  We have to choose to be with another, and not let their behavior determine our choices for us.  We have to choose.
2. Moralness.   Authenticity is a moral experience in that it is a true expression of our personal integrity.  Authenticity is being ourselves, not our roles. 
3. Acceptance.  Acceptance of ourselves and others must underlie all authentic experience.  Becoming conscious of our own judgmentalism  and righteousness is a prerequisite.
4. Self-Responsibility.  We feel totally and fully responsible for ourselves when we are authentic with another.
5. Attentiveness. We cannot be authentically involved if we are not listening.  Hearing is not listening.  Responding before we deeply experience is not listening.
6. Risk-taking.  To risk the insecurity of not knowing what the other really wants of us makes authenticity more likely.
7. Presence.  Authenticity involves an experiential commitment that is not diluted by time, even when our time together is limited. It transcends time.
8. Naturalness.  Authenticity is natural when we have not  been socialized to lose our way.
9. Participation.  Authenticity is increased in proportion to our willingness to surrender to our commonality.
10. Personal Surrender.  We allow the other the relational opportunity to be themselves with us without our agenda distorting and disabling our relating.
11. Reciprocity.  We share equally with each other…we share equally in our beingness.
12. Engagement.  Authenticity is a playful way of being, even when there is a structure and purpose to our meeting.  It allows for serendipity.
13. Systemic detachment.  To be authentic, we must realize that we are not the systems in which we participate, in which we work.

Dr. Candace Cole-McCrea—4

 

14. Creativity.  Authenticity is a creative art.  It is never the same twice.  We submit to becoming an emerging self connecting to another emerging self.  The end of the book of our lives has not been yet written.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 

Hughes, Claire.Social Understanding and Social Lives.Psychology Press. 2011

 

McGee, John J. and Frank Menolascino.Beyond Gentle Teaching:A Non- Aversive Approach to Helping Those in Need.Plenum Press. 1991

 

Musie, Graham.Nurturing Natures:Attachment and Children’s Emotional, Sociocultural and rain Development.Psychology Press. 2011

 

Seller, Birger. I Don’t Want to Be Inside Me Any More.Basic Books. 1995

 

Tulitz, Brett (ed).Early Interventions for Trauma and Traumatic Loss.Guilford Press.2004

 

 

CONTACT INFORMATION

 

Dr. Candace Cole-McCrea

Raptor’s Calling Inc.

60 Ford Farm Road

Milton NH 03851

603 652-7594

snowyowl@metrocast.net