“No more, We Have a Counselor…Let’s Get Real”
My title is from an article about student suicide. It is a quote by a Colorado student in an article by Brown, Jennifer & Ingold, John, (Sep. 5, 2017) Two Student Suicides in Two Days, Both Following Social Media Posts, Leave Littleton Community Seeking Answers, Denver Post, retrieved from http://www.denverpost.com/2017/09/01/littleton-student-suicides-social-media-posts/
Here is the full quote. “Sophie Engel, though, was among the many Arapahoe students exhausted by another suicide, pouring out her frustrations on Twitter and asking, “Do you see us yet?” She criticized what she sees as the same-old approach by schools. “No more ‘We have a counselor for you (along with a couple hundred other students)’ or ‘Call if you need anything’ crap. Wake up. Do something different. Change the culture,” she wrote. “Let’s get real.”
Ms. Engel is screaming to adults at the helm. And she is not the only one screaming to be heard, to make the pain stop, to “do something different.”
The young people committing suicide, taking anxiety meds in record numbers, starving themselves, numbing with drugs and alcohol, self harming, and dealing with crippling self doubt are all screaming loud and clear to the adults running the show.
And what does our generation do?
More.And.More.And.More.Of.The.Same.
But more of the same is doing the opposite of working, it is failing. The field we prop up as our savior to these problems, the field of psychology, is unique in that the more its theories and practices fail, the more frenetically we hang onto them for comfort.
How bad need things get before we heed the wisdom of the children and “get real” by doing something different? And what should that something different be?
I am devoting the latter half of my career as an educator to research and write about why we need to transition away from scientifically unverified and unverifiable psychological theories of thought, behavior and emotion and replace them with scientifically sound theories because all our educational, parenting, and health care practices take direction and guidance from our psychological theories. In addition, the information we teach students for how to understand themselves and others is pulled directly from psychology.
But if you take any time to review just a few foundational theories of psychology, you will scratch your head as to how they were ever installed in the first place let alone how have they have remained in place for so long.
Foundational theories of psychology are binary, full of contradiction, hyper critical of human behavior and emotion, share no mutual agreement, vague, prescriptive rather than descriptive, ideologically based rather than observationally based, disorder based, and nobody makes it a secret the foundational theories were arrived at thorough pure conjecture, not via observation or the scientific method.
Psychological theories are the weak link in all the sciences related to human health. From your neuroscientist, neurologist, medical doctor, psychiatrist, on down to your licensed family and marriage counselor, psychological theories are used to guide research, practice, and conclusions in all these fields.
The smoke and mirrors is many psychological studies are done by the book and in compliance with the scientific method, so the field seems legit. But nobody notices these proper studies are tainted due to the underlying assumptions built into them, assumptions derived from intellectually inaccurate and sloppy psychological theories.
What the human brain actually does has become better understood the past decade. But new data has been obscured by absurd conclusions about the individual human perpetuated by psychology like low vs. high self esteem, risk taker vs. cautiousness, introvert vs. extravert, empathetic vs. un-empathetic, domineering vs. submissive, social vs, anti-social, selfish vs. selfless, etc. These kinds of binary and hyper critical characterizations serve to cut our children down and have nothing to offer healthy brain development, quite the opposite.
To “get real” and “do something different” we need new theories and we need a whole new set of neutral and descriptive vocabulary words with which to describe human thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Otherwise we will continue to get the same results. Otherwise we will continue to raise children who grow up learning only the language of crippling self doubt, self criticism, and bullying.
Thanks to psychology, there are no words our children have access to in the current vernacular that can make them feel anything but inferior or superior because a child only learns about himself as compared against an ideal. And if you are a child dealing with significant thinking or behavioral differences or trauma, forget about it. The language you learn to describe your differences and your trauma is language telling you in no uncertain terms that barring miraculous measures you will never overcome your genetics and/or your experiences. You will almost surely be forever marginalized and disenfranchised, so forget about it. You will always be less than.
Thanks to psychology and the very shallow definition of empathy they’ve supplied, educators are currently over committing to this single, very personal and private emotion. Instead of “doing something different” we are desperately trying to turn all of our children into super human empaths. In so doing, we are not only perpetuating an inaccurate definition of empathy, we are also attempting to place the responsibility for affecting systemic change onto our children. But this is too big an ask. We should not be asking our children to be responsible for the emotional well being of their peers, something biologically impossible in the first place.
We can certainly encourage treating peers with respect and dignity, but the language in place, again, supplies our children with many more words to tear each other down down than to build each other up. Tossing around the word empathy as often as possible is not going to create the systemic change we need.
Instead, we adults should hold ourselves to a higher standard. We should be the ones modeling how to treat others with respect and dignity. We should be the ones setting each child up for success, not just the quiet and compliant ones. We should be responsible for the emotional well being of all our children and students.
We adults need to “do something, change the culture, get real.” Our words, body language, and facial expressions are the only direct means by which we can transfer information and culture to our children. Are we transferring respect or diminishment; are we modeling how to support or bully?
If we adults were consistently expressing respectful and supportive body language and dialogue, then we would see mainly respect and supportive body language and dialogue being transferred by our children to one another. This is not the case which tells us we are in desperate need of theories with the capacity to give adults the tools and language they need to treat children with respect always, particularly during times of conflict. It is easy to do, but not with the tools, ideas, or scripts we’ve been provided from the field of psychology.
Our psychological theories have come up with an arbitrary template for how the most perfectly normal child in the world should think, emote, and behave. This perfectly normal child is as mythical as Santa Clause, and exists nowhere in nature. Nonetheless we dangle this idealized child in front of our real children and teach them to aspire to be like him. We constantly measure our real children up to this ideal and let them know when they are falling short or surpassing. This causes extreme personality confusion and there is no other choice but for our children to grow up with crippling self doubt or a crippling abundance of self superiority. We give our children no choice but to perceive themselves as less than or greater than. Neither choice makes for healthy, happy, civil children.
It is no wonder many people grow up to be adults with no clue as to where they end and other people begin. A child who is treated as an empty vessel adults are trying to turn into their vision of what they think he should be is objectified his whole life. The natural outcome is for the child to grow up and objectify other people. Physical, mental, and sexual abuse flourishes in this culture of objectification.
If we want to minimize abuse in our culture, we need to start raising and educating children with theories that prove each child makes sense of information in customized ways that make sense to him or her, not in the ways that make sense to a parent, a teacher, a therapist, or an authority of some kind. We need to stop objectifying children as if it is their job to think, respond, and behave like the ideal child we prop up in front of them like a carrot on a stick.
I invite all parents and educators to take a second look at the psychological theories we have been expected to take on faith our whole lives. Can we replace the reductive, hyper-critical theories and language of psychology with something better?
I believe we can. I have begun the process and am hoping many more parents, educators, and concerned scientists will do the same. Building new theories and a new vocabulary with which to understand and talk about the human brain/personality will help all of us, not just the children!
