Transcription of Viewpoint, #96
Speaker 1: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Download past shows and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on ITunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors. Maine Magazine. Marci Booth of Booth Maine. Apothecary by Design. Premier Sports Health a Division of Black Bear Medical. Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists. Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of Remax Heritage. Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes, and Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 96, Viewpoint airing for the first time on Sunday, July 14, 2013. Today’s guests include Stephen Schwartz principal attorney with Schwartz and Schwartz and psychotherapist Dr. Stephen Aronson.
As a physician, I’ve learned that viewpoint is everything and that everyone has a story to tell. Things are not always as they seem. We’re never entirely sure that what we see is what is reality, or what we hear is reality. If you can have an open mind and be compassionate and listen to what we are told, or explore more of what we think is going on around us we’re certainly going to be better off in our own lives and I think that we’re also better off in dealing with other people that we coexist on this planet with. We hope you enjoy our conversations with Stephen Schwartz and also Dr. Stephen Aronson. Thank you for joining us today.
Stephen S.: Today I’m sitting with a man who is no stranger to the microphone. This is Stephen Schwartz of Schwartz and Schwartz, a local attorney who also happens to do broadcast work, actually, in the area of sports and is an umpire and has so many different talents, but it’s somebody that I’ve known for many years through my son, Campbell, who played sports with his son, Andrew. It’s a pleasure to have you here today.
Stephen S.: Thank you kindly. Real pleasure to be here, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: We’re going to talk about the lawyer thing which is really important and we’re going to talk about some more serious subjects, but why is it that you like sports so much that you would dedicate your time to being a local announcer and an umpire for little league baseball?
Stephen S.: Well, I think it’s how I grew up. We grew up as huge Red Sox fans in Portland which was really troubling. Of course my children think that the Red Sox are just always champions because especially my youngest, two championships within his 16 years. My father lived and died a whole life without ever seeing the Red Sox win a championship, which was the case with most people in New England of that generation. Having three boys didn’t hurt things. My wife, Suzy, who is also an attorney was a professional ballet dancer in New York City and had danced at the Joffrey School for several years. That may be in fact where my kids get their athletic prowess, frankly; but having three boys, things changed a little bit in terms of our interests and scope and it kind of gravitated towards sports and athletics, as well as music for my kids.
I just think that that was the natural extension. I started coaching little league. They used to make us umpire, the coaches, and I liked it so I kept it up and that was my one tie to baseball after my kids all went to the dark side and started playing lacrosse, which all three of them do. Then, we would go to all of their games anyway and you know well what this is like traveling to all of their games. At Portland High they needed somebody to film the games for the coaches and for TV 3, WPPS TV 3 which is Portland Public Schools has a station that Time Warner gives them. As a result of that they broadcast the games, so I said I’ll do it.
Then I actually saw another young man from Deering High School, a student doing some games and he was in front of the camera, and he was doing some announcing. I said “You know, I think I can do that.” so I started to announce games. We started during the playoffs run when Portland High went to the State Championship. They played in Falmouth versus Bangor and I really bitten by the bug, so since that time I’ve been broadcasting all sports. Ones where I have a dog in the fight, where my kids are playing, and now I do other things. I’ve done basketball playoffs including the State Championship two years ago for Deering High, and I was also, I should say, among my two majors in college I was a broadcasting major. I did the news for a local station up there and I think it was just a natural progression and I think it’s really my mid-life crisis. My mid-life crisis is umpiring and broadcasting.
Dr. Lisa: Well you know it’s not the worst mid-life crisis to have given all the possibilities. I think that’s all right.
Stephen S: Fair.
Dr. Lisa: It strikes me that no matter whether you’re doing work as an umpire or work as a broadcaster or work as an attorney, part of what you need to do is be an observer of life. You have to be paying attention and in some cases you need to be making judgments, but in other cases you just need to be open to what’s going on around you. Is this something that started when you were younger, this sort of keen observational sense and need?
Stephen S: You know perhaps. I must say that when I was growing up and I went to Deering High School, Lincoln Junior and then Deering. I don’t believe that I was necessarily the best student but there were certain classes in which I did quite well, such as speech class for example, or making speeches or running for office at the school and things like that. I think that’s where it probably all started and then I think that it was actually a piece of advice that I received much later on when I was a practicing lawyer and an assistant DA in York County and my boss was Mary Tousignant, who was the DA.
I was trying my first felony trial. It was a jury waived trial. I was a prosecutor and I was asking her a question while a witness was talking, and she just kind of looked at me and gave me this stern look and said “Listen!” I’ll really never forget that. It didn’t matter what I needed to talk about or think about, she said you must listen to what the witnesses are saying. We talked about that, and that was a great piece of advice for me.
The fact is that I think as an attorney or when you’re on the field or anything else you have to listen. I have often commented that, and I kind of feel this way in a trial although things are much more intense when you have one and you’re in [a hearing 00:08:43] and people’s sometimes lives are at stake and their livelihood and things like that. On the baseball field especially, I feel like you can tune everything out and just concentrate. You got to know the rules and you get to watch parts of the game. If you’re doing well as an umpire, you’re missing a lot of the game. You might see a great home run, but if you’re on the bases you better be checking to make sure the people are tagging the bases, so you don’t get to see it go over the fence unless you’re behind the plate.
There’s that, and I do think that of course you do have to perceive all that is around you as an attorney. It’s extremely important.
Dr. Lisa: It’s the ability to look at things more globally, but also more specifically which comes in both as an attorney, as an umpire, as an announcer as well.
Stephen S: Well it’s really very true. In fact, I’m preparing right now for a case that’s likely to be going to trial on a criminal matter and I have really needed to spend some time with the police report reading every single word, really delving into the specifics of it instead of the generalities that we deal with when we go to court on discussion days and things like that. Really getting into the minutiae of the facts of the case and I have engaged my own investigator to do an investigation. To go behind what the witnesses seem to be saying, the police witnesses and other witnesses, and so you have to be very detail oriented and you do have to look at the specific even though you have a broader view.
Dr. Lisa: As a teacher of physicians, I have sent medical students into a room and had them come back with a story that a patient has given, and I’ve gone into the room with them and the story shifts slightly. I’ve noticed that there’s a big difference between what one person sees and hears and perceives and what another person sees and perceives. How do you deal with that as a part of the practice of law?
Stephen S: Well, you know I think that jurors are smarter than perhaps in years past and more educated. I think judges are as well. I don’t think that eyewitness testimony in and of itself is … I think it is sometimes enough to convict, and sometimes that’s all there is in a criminal matter or in an accident case or something like that. I think the people realize that eyewitness testimony is to be scrutinized.
That if people, if we had five people in this room right now and we had them take a look at me and then had them turn around and asked them what color is tie. We would get all kinds of responses from people wanting to please us and say something, from people that think it happens to be a grey and black tie, but it is two-tone black, to who knows what, to I thought I saw maroon there. I think that people are wise to that, and they’re educated to that and they’re educated to that because of things like the Innocence Project and because there is a concept in criminal law called actual innocence. It’s a concept that we don’t have to prove and by any means. We have to raise reasonable doubt sufficient that at least one juror on a jury of 12 in State Court will have that doubt.
I just think that eyewitness testimony is just one facet of all different types of testimony and you’re right, histories change when people are talking and people have motivations. “My Cousin Vinny” was a great movie and it really showed how eyewitness testimony really can be flawed, and the woman hadn’t been wearing her glasses when she saw what she thought she saw, and her timing was off. You have to do that. When you have an eyewitness you have to look behind that.
There are experts that you can engage if your clients have the resources that will be glad to talk to a jury about eyewitness testimony and its faults. People are educated to that. Even by watching “CSI” they know that there needs be, or they believe that there needs to be something more. That there should be a science to it. That’s why if you have DNA evidence for example, it’s largely, not completely, but largely irrefutable.
Dr. Lisa: What kind of motivations could people have in seeing or hearing something and sort of changing it to what they believe it to be?
Stephen S: Well, you know it could be an unconscious motivation. It could be a desire to please. It may not be anything nefarious, but it depends. You are allowed, the rules of evidence allow you to look into the bias of witnesses and some may have bias.
Dr. Lisa: What happens when you have a variety of different people and everybody says something slightly different and you don’t have any DNA evidence and you’re working on trying to either defend or convict somebody? How do you deal with that?
Stephen S: Well if you have a variety of people with a variety of different opinions or views of the facts then it seems to me that you likely have reasonable doubt.
Dr. Lisa: That would mean?
Stephen S: It would mean an acquittal in a criminal case. It would mean … if you have a duty to prove your case beyond a reasonable doubt it could be difficult. If you’re in a civil matter in the civil arena where the standards are either by a preponderance of the evidence or by clear and convincing evidence, which is the step in between that and reasonable doubt and preponderance. Then you may have some people that question, some jurors that question, or fact finders that question what is right and whether or not the matter has been sufficiently proven.
Dr. Lisa: Is this the reason that we have tried to the extent that we have tried to allow people to have the benefit of the doubt. To give them, to read them their Miranda rights, to make it possible for them to try to prove their case because there is this possibility of reasonable doubt?
Stephen S: I want to understand your question. Why do we have things like Miranda rights and things like that?
Dr. Lisa: Yeah.
Stephen S: I mean, we have them because the United States Constitution demands it and the United States Supreme Court has said this is what it means to have a fifth amendment right to remain silent. That is not just a right that sits in the abstract, that’s a real palpable right that all of us have, and people need to be told about that right is what that case stands for Miranda vs. Arizona stands for. There are other rights such as the sixth amendment right to council which is a part of that as well. You have the right to counsel and that’s a right that people are told about, usually fairly early on in the proceedings.
Does it mean that on occasion you’re not going to get the information that you need in law enforcement? Maybe. Does it mean that somebody is not going to be badgered because they’re thinking about it and they’re saying “You know I think I want to have a lawyer.”? That may be also true. However, the constitutional rights that we enjoy are not for the benefit of the government. They’re for the benefit of individuals.
Dr. Lisa: Is that because in the past people weren’t given the benefit of rights and were sometimes unjustly jailed?
Stephen S: Unjustly jailed or I mean the classic example is beaten with a rubber hose. You certainly hope that that doesn’t happen in this day and age, but it did happen. I think that that was one of the wrongs that the Supreme Court sought to correct, and furthermore our founders sought to correct the injustices that they saw with respect to the justice system in Britain.
Dr. Lisa: We’ll return to our program in a moment. On the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast we’ve long understood the important link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the subject is Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial.
Tom: My wife and I have three kids. The first one likes to spend her money. The second one likes to save it, and the third? Well the third is more like an investor. When we smile and laugh and make light of the relationship that they each have with their money, it reinforces their behavior. Our question for you is this, what relationship with money did your parents reinforce? Do you and your partner reinforce those as well?
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Dr. Lisa: It’s interesting to me as somebody who has heard a lot of patient stories and has heard a lot of … I’m a family doctor, so I’ll bring a family in and the father will have one thing that they say and the mother will have one thing that she says and everybody has a different perception of the reality, but they also have different needs that they need to fulfill.
Say it’s a child that they think might be abusing drugs. It may be something that the father needs to have go a certain way because of something that has to do with him.
Stephen S: I almost can understand what you’re getting at. We pride ourselves in my office, and it was something that my father did and I try to do, I’ve been doing this now going on my 28th year, representing the whole person. What that means is … and it is mostly in a criminal matter. It’s not exclusively though because if we have a client who has been involved in a serious accident and needs medical treatment and their bills paid, we help them through that too.
We don’t just say “You just work on getting better and we won’t do anything for several years and then we’ll get a pot of gold at the end of rainbow.” That’s not how that works. It’s compensation based on injuries, but we try as best we can to marshal the medical treatment and the help with that if we can, and counsel because as our diploma says we are attorneys and counselors at law.
In a criminal matter when somebody comes into my office and especially the younger they are the more the supplies, but it could be anybody. Our goal is to try to help people to not recidivate and not just to take the one case and put it through the system unless that’s what our client’s desire is. Of course when you represent young people, families come into the room. We’ll excuse them at times when the attorney-client privilege needs to be intact and we don’t want to lose that. Otherwise if somebody wants their friend or family in the room to talk about the case generally or where we’re going to head with it, then that’s fine.
What we tell our clients especially our juvenile clients, and we actually have a written fee agreement that says this that they sign. They don’t have capacity to contract, but they sign it and the guarantor. Whoever is paying our fee signs it, and we have a paragraph that makes it very clear that regardless of who is paying the freight, that’s not the person that calls the shots. With our advice, our clients make decisions and we actually put in there even if the decision made by our client is then contravention to what the guarantor wants to happen.
I think that’s an added comfort level. I can tell you that … so we’ll meet with the whole family. We’ll come up with a game plan. Whoever our client wants in the room, the family wants in the room, and some will say “Well we want these very strict bail conditions.” I’ll say “Well, you know I want to talk with you about that. I think we can do things and see if our client is willing to do these voluntarily. Counseling or evaluations and things, but I’d rather not make it subject to a bail condition because I’m representing your son in this case and if your son violates the bail condition, your son’s going to go to Long Creek or maybe to the County Jail for a while.”
That’s problematic, so my job is to mitigate those damages as well as to see to it that somebody can be helped. If that was the nature of your question in terms of involving family and that sort of thing, then that’s what we try to do. I always tell my clients “You know when you leave this room you can pick up the phone and call me and we can have a private conversation.” That has happened to me on more than one occasion. I’d have a client say “I know you’re representing me” for example, “for this theft case that I have. My parents don’t know I have another theft case pending. Can you help me with that?”
I’ll usually say “Yes, but I won’t be able to necessarily send mail to your house and we’ll have to talk about that, but of course I can help you with that.” That’s happened to me before.
Dr. Lisa: What type of legacy would you like to leave for your sons? I mean obviously you still have many years of practice ahead of you, but you, I’m sure, are thinking about the legacy that your father left you. You have three sons and what would you like them to know and to learn from you?
Stephen S: Well, I do think that having a work ethic is important. Having a strong work ethic to I’m able to do things like broadcast because I’ll go to the office and maybe stay there until 11 p.m. many nights or work from home or something like that. I think that’s important. My kids, in my opinion, have much more varied interests than I did at their age. They have many more things at their fingertips, much more information of course at their fingertips than I ever had. I’m not sure that I can leave a legacy for my kids as much as learn from them. They’re musicians. They are decent athletes. They’re decent students and I think all at a much younger age than … They were good students and musicians than I was. I was in a band in law school and we played in a few venues, not very much. Just for the fun of it. Although my friends who were musicians are really good, I was actually the singer who played a little guitar.
I think the legacy that I’d like to leave is the word perseverance. I remember in seventh grade I got like a two and when four was the best, on perseverance. My father sat me down and explained to me what perseverance means and how to keep going at something. That was when my grades, at that particular time, were pretty good but perseverance was an issue. I think that would be a good legacy to leave, to persevere and to keep going for it.
Dr. Lisa: I appreciate your coming in and talking to us today and I think there are many parallels between medicine and law, so it’s been interesting for me to hear some of the things that you’ve dealt with with your clients and to think about how those types of have impacted me and how I’ve dealt with my patients, so really appreciate your coming in and talking about all of this with me.
We’ve been talking to Stephen Schwartz of Schwartz and Schwartz here in Portland.
Stephen S: Thank you kindly. It was a pleasure to be here.
Dr. Lisa: We on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast hope that our listeners enjoy their own work lives to the same extent we do, and fully embrace every day. As a physician and a small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: If we all saw things the same way it strikes me that life would be less complicated. We would have all the same experiences, share the same perspectives and point of views, but at the same time if we are all seeing the same things the same way life would be pretty boring and mundane. I get more, way more out of life by discussing and sharing my viewpoint with my family and friends, and trying to understand and learn from theirs.
It’s the same with relationships with clients. Of course they see their businesses from one point of view and I from another. It’s this partnership of shared perspectives that creates value. It lets me and my team focus on their business’s financial health so they can spend more time visualizing their success and that’s just the way I see it.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need. Boothmaine.com.
Speaker 1: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is brought to you by the following generous sponsors. Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of Remax Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With Remax Heritage, it’s your move. Learn more at rheritage.com.
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Dr. Lisa: There are lots of different ways to see the world and there are people who spend their time helping us see the world in different ways. One of these people is Dr. Stephen Aronson who is a psychotherapist with Mental Health Associates of Maine which is right here in Portland. Dr. Aronson has a very eclectic background and training and has been in practice since 1971, so we’re pretty privileged to have you here in the studio today to talk to us about the way that we see the world and the way that we can enrich our experience in the world by trying to take a different view. Thank you for coming in.
Stephen A: You’re welcome. Thank you for the invitation.
Dr. Lisa: Why did you decide to become a psychotherapist?
Stephen A: Well I think it came naturally. When I was a young person at school all my friends seemed comfortable talking to me. I didn’t think about it at that time, but from an early age was always interested in mystery, in discovering what lay behind apparent reality. The greatest mystery of all seemed to be consciousness.
I think without knowing it moved me in that direction and out of a number of fields that I could have enjoyed, psychology seemed to give me the greatest flexibility.
Dr. Lisa: When you say that you had an interest in consciousness, was this something that developed while you were in school or is this something that you had a sense of before you even began getting an education?
Stephen A: What came first was the attraction to mystery. It always seemed to me that there was more to life than the material world around me. There must be something that lay behind this, and something that was behind us. I was attracted to all the things young people were attracted to in that situation, spent some time looking at extrasensory perception and flying saucers and ghosts and lost civilizations. As I matured, it moved towards the mystery of how do we know anything? What are we doing here? What is the meaning of life? What’s the meaning of existence? There has to be something behind it.
I could see that the tree was inherent in the seed. The entire pattern for the tree was in the seed. Just add water, dirt, and sunlight and it exfoliates out of that tiny little seed. It seemed to me that we exfoliate from somewhere into our life and into our bodies and we’re motivated to do what we do and what we don’t do by patterns within us, much of which we don’t know anything about.
I could see within myself that there were hidden patterns. The question of who am I and what is my purpose here? What kind of responsibility do I have for being alive? Gradually became more predominant and as I become an adult it could become more articulated that way. Looking back I see a trail of bread crumbs that led me to this place.
Dr. Lisa: Did you start having these questions about who you were and what there was behind, what was behind, what was behind, what was behind, did you start having questions when you were younger?
Stephen A: Yes, I had these questions when I was a boy.
Dr. Lisa: How did that feel to be living in a world where a lot of people didn’t really have those types of questions?
Stephen A: The same way it feels now. As most people tell me.
Dr. Lisa: Are you any closer to the answers?
Stephen A: I am for myself, or at least I have sufficient additional meaning to keep me happily on the search without being frustrated.
Dr. Lisa: You do have this very eclectic background. Cognitive, behavioral, Ionian, transpersonal, and many other things I think that you have got an education in and an experience with. How has this all lent to a greater understanding within yourself of the bigger questions and the bigger answers, perhaps?
Stephen A: Well, one analogy that comes to mind is the Hubble telescope. There’s many different instruments in it, so if you look at the universe just in terms of visible light you get one picture. If you add infrared you get another. Ultraviolet you get another. Radio waves you get another, and the composite begins to build and build and deepen and deepen. Soon you see more and more what is there that you couldn’t see without the extra instrumentation.
I think we are just like that. We need to learn to look at ourselves. When Socrates, whoever his teacher was, advised to know thyself. I understand he didn’t come up with that, but he just got the credit. How do you know yourself? Our senses direct us into the world outside of us. Where life seems to be and all activity seems to be and where we’re going to find fame, wealth, and happiness. Yet all our experiences of life are inside of us. They’re in our mind, in our heart, in our sensations.
We seem to live outside but we don’t really. We live inside and we have all these impressions and vibrations coming from the outside through our senses to tell us what the world is around us, but our hopes, our dreams, our expectations, our thoughts, our feelings, our aspirations, the nasty parts of us, the saintly parts of us, that’s all inside. That’s all invisible and that’s who we are.
To know yourself you have to look at that. You have to … our senses help us observe outside in the world, but to know yourself you have to observe yourself and there are no sense organs that we know about for seeing inside and yet we do. We can see our thoughts. We can see our feelings. We see our contradictions, our hopes and our fears if we’re looking. If we know how to look.
All of these experiences helped me develop a variety of instruments, you might say, or attitudes or ways of paying attention inside my heart and my mind and my body looking into my past and the interpretation I made of it, which has changed over the years. You can change your past. It’s just a story. My aspirations and fears about the future which were just fantasies and have no reality. All of that has helped me develop the multi-layered understanding of this pattern that I know as Steve, inside this body I was born into. That gives me a very different sense of myself and my direction with what seems to be the world around me because it’s really experienced only in the world within me. In each of us there’s a world onto ourselves.
Dr. Lisa: That sort of groundlessness is a challenging thing for, I believe, this culture probably many cultures where we are always striving to achieve some sort of solidity. We’re always trying to find some sort of sense of security of who we are and identifying things about ourselves that can help us create more, I guess validity is the word.
Stephen A: Right.
Dr. Lisa: How do you work with this groundlessness in yourself and in people who come to see you in your practice?
Stephen A: Paradoxically it turns out not to feel groundless. It feels much more solid and it’s the outside world that seems much more impermanent. You get a house, you lose a house. You get a car, you lose the car. You’re young, then you’re old. You have a job, then you don’t have the job. People like you, then you don’t like you. What is permanent outside? Whatever I think outside is my interpretation of it. If I change my mind about something, it changes. Whatever it is didn’t change, but my experience of it changed because I now have a different attitude.
What the world out there is depends on what I think it is and feel it is. If I come to see that how I’ve come to those conclusions maybe might have been accurate at one time, but isn’t now or might be modified by a different perspective, or maybe it was because I got conditioned to think of certain things in a particular way and now I don’t. My world changes, but it changes because I’ve changed as a person in my heart, and mind, and my attitudes.
From the ordinary outside viewpoint, where everything is material and has a solidity for our senses. It seems groundless, but from the inside there’s now a sense of solidity about myself that was never there before.
Dr. Lisa: The goal of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help make connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world. Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: When one enters a nature preserve or a secluded wooded area, we often think that we are the observer. Have you ever thought that upon entering such a space that we are in fact the observed? A thousand eyes are looking upon us. We can choose to see the natural world through hard eyes or soft eyes.
Hard eyes make us separate from nature and also from other people. Soft eyes connect us to nature and to people around us. We welcome and observe the world around us with a sense of awe. Through this vision, it is as if we are seeing the world around us for the very first time. It is a fresh and new look.
I think that in landscaping, in working with land and landscape one of the things I really try to do is have a great, deep reverence and respect for the natural world and I try to bring that journey to my clients as we work together in designing and creating their landscape. I’m Ted Carter and if you’d like to contact me I can be reached at tedcarterdesign.com.
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Dr. Lisa: At the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast we believe we are helping to build a better world with the help of many. We like to bring to you people who are examples of those building a better world in the areas of wellness, health, and fitness. To talk to you today about one of these, fitness, is Jim Greatorex the President of Premier Sports Health. A division of Black Bear Medical. Here is Jim.
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Dr. Lisa: One of the things that we know is a side effect of some of these medications which we call psychotropic medications, is an interesting disruption of the dream state. The dream state has been something that I know Young and Freud and others have used for a while to actually examine our lives and bigger patterns and maybe even patterns of things that we don’t remember.
When we use medication that disrupts the dream state, are we somehow disrupting these clues that we could be using to figure out what’s going on in our lives?
Stephen A: I once read a quote attributed to some rabbi who said that an unexamined dream is like an unopened letter from God. Of course we don’t pay much attention to dreams anyway, most of us. Most therapists do not use dream work. The question is really out of my field I just know what I’ve read about levels of sleep dreams and that insufficient REM sleep is not so good.
To the degree to which it’s disrupted, it’s probably not helpful but most people don’t pay attention to their dreams anyway. If they have one once in a while one wouldn’t know how to interpret it.
Dr. Lisa: Well, and we’ve become a sleepless nation regardless of use of psychotropics. I mean we’ve become a nation that doesn’t necessarily go to bed on time, doesn’t have very good sleep throughout the night. Given this possibility that dreams are an unopened gift from God, if we’re not sleeping well enough to dream then we actually can’t receive this gift.
Stephen A: One would presume that would follow. I think in many ways one of the downsides of our technology is that we can change our natural rhythms. We don’t have to go to sleep when the body wants to.
Dr. Lisa: What about some of these very basic human instincts that have somehow become mislabeled as bad or evil. On this show we don’t talk a lot about sex, but that’s a very primal drive. That is something that we need for procreation and yet it’s become associated in most situations with something bad or evil and it does become something that people want to not think about and not deal with because there’s so much shame associated with it. Do you think that this is one of the reasons why people are perhaps not as connected to one another as they could be because of shame around things like this very basic human connection?
Stephen A: That’s an interesting idea. It certainly is another way that we artificially, through imagination, distort natural processes. How can we imagine the kind of creative energy inside of biological material that can create a human being? We all carry this energy somehow within us. We don’t know how it got there. We have no idea what it is because we don’t know what we are or how we got here either. Under certain conditions it produces another human being, as I said, sort of exfoliates out of somewhere into the fetus and then out of the womb and into the world and begins to grow and grow and just like a tree. Then it does stuff and then after a while it gets old and shrinks and the body dies. Tremendous mystery.
It appears that humans have more pleasure from the sexual act than animals, so when we’re looking for stimulation to distract us that’s a very powerful one. Plus, at certain points in life it is an overpowering drive. Surely for men and surely for women when they’re of the child bearing age. If it hasn’t been damaged emotionally or mentally by shame messages, or guilt messages, or sin messages, or abuse, emotional or physical or sexual, then it has a natural flow, or ought to.
In those cases where those are the factors that come into play and unfortunately for large numbers of us they are there. Then it gets very confusing. As I said earlier, reality is what I think it is, so if I think that breathing is bad I’ll feel bad about breathing. If I think that sexual energy is bad then I’ll feel bad about experiencing it, but good luck. You’re not going to stop breathing and you can’t stop experiencing sexual energy. It’s got to go someplace and if doesn’t find an appropriate expression it’ll find an inappropriate expression. If it doesn’t find an external expression then it’ll make us sick inside. I shouldn’t be having these feelings. Well, you’ve got a body. You’re programmed to have these feelings at certain points. What are you going to do about it?
It’s very unfortunate that in some cultures and in this one in particular, we’re so hypocritical and dualistic about it. At the same time the traditional messages are restrain yourself. The popular culture is pouring out messages to the opposite. Hypersexualizing everything, and then surprised that we have difficulties with this. On the other hand, it’s a very mysterious and amazing process and it releases such potent emotional energies and psychological energies that if appropriately contained within an appropriate relationship it can produce a tremendous health and bonding.
It’s often misused for power. It’s exploited for various things because, I guess, like money, people want it. There’s nothing wrong with money. It depends on how it’s used. Sex is a natural process. It depends on how it’s used.
Dr. Lisa: When these feelings get maybe have, I don’t want to say dysfunctional exactly, but perhaps there are some dysfunctional associations of sexual feelings. Can people tend to project things onto other people outside of themselves because they’re so uncomfortable with whatever it is they’re feeling inside, but they just want to get rid of it? They’ll look at somebody outside of themselves and they’ll start to assign some sort of blame or some sort of story to somebody else when it comes to sex.
Stephen A: I would say yes it’s a projection whether it has to do with sex or anything else. We see all sorts of behaviors and attitudes around us all the time that are different from our own, but we don’t personally get offended and emotionally charged up and judgmental or want to do something about all of them. There only certain of them.
The pattern for me is the different for the pattern for you. Why is that? Because it’s a projection of the pattern within me. Why do certain people volunteer to be censors? None of you should look at that stuff. I’ll take the burden on myself. Really, well thank you but why are you doing that? Looking at the pattern of one’s judgments and prejudices and also attractions, it is a way of reading an x-ray of parts of your inner world on the outside screen. For instance on the positive side, why do we have certain heroes and not others? Why are your heroes different than mine? Because I see in that person or in that story something that resonates with me. I would like to be that. Why? Because I’m already programmed to be something like that, and I’m not that yet but that’s in the direction of what I’d like to be. Otherwise, why would I have that attraction?
Same way if there’s something particularly personally repellent to me and I’m really going to take a public stand. Now, I’m not talking about cruelty. I’m just talking about behaviors that don’t harm people. I don’t like the way that person lives. I don’t like their politics. Well, what’s it to you? All right so you don’t like it. In any given moment we have all sorts of preferences. We have intellectual preferences, emotional preferences, physical comfort preferences. No moment gives us gratification over all those preferences. Some come closer, then we want to hold on to them. Then they go and we think they’ve been stolen.
Usually we never get everything we want in a given moment, but it’s not the fact that we don’t get our preferences that creates a loss of energy or an explosion. It’s my objection to the fact that I’m not getting the moment that I expected. What’s going on here? I expect it. I want it. There’s something wrong. I’m not getting it. Return this moment to the sender, to the factory. Give me another one.
Again, maybe this comes back to the friction we were talking about earlier. That the inability to tolerate the delay of gratification, the inability to actually see that payment is necessary first if you want something of value. They can’t just charge it. I mean you can if it’s a material thing, but not if it has to do with learning something or changing your feelings or developing a relationship, anything of a nonmaterial nature. You can’t have it when you want it. You got to earn it.
You want to learn Chinese? Study for 10 years. You want to learn medicine? Study for at least seven years. You want to learn anything you really got to work at it. If you want to become a more brave person or more tolerant person, you got to work at that. You have to see the places you’re not brave and not tolerant and figure out what you’re going to do about that. It takes time.
This builds up friction. If I see the discrepancy between who I really am at the moment and how I’d like to be, that’s uncomfortable. Now that could either be an inspiration to just go back to work or it could make me get angry at someone for depriving me, or if I can make them look smaller, then the difference isn’t so bad and I can feel better, or I can just lie to myself rather than face that tension.
Dr. Lisa: What about the idea of a group projection where an event happens and people chose to see it a certain way and yet it’s really not that way, it’s some other way and eventually it could be proven that they were incorrect? Why would an entire group of people see an event one way?
Stephen A: They share a mindset. Groups are like psychic organisms in a way. People who think the same way will just naturally seek each other out and mostly for benign reasons, sometimes creative reasons. Like attracts like and we tend generally to gather with people who we feel are like us. If I have a particular kind of prejudice I may gradually find myself surrounded by people who share that because people who don’t make me uncomfortable. I exclude them or they exclude me, so after a while there’s a whole group of us. We’re a certain kind of mind set and if you get someone in that group with charisma who can act as leader, and most people are followers. Then they will take there issue and project it.
It’s the same as when I was talking about earlier. The world is what I think it is. If I believe X, Y, or Z about a certain person or group, I believe it. I can find others who believe the same thing. The more one has invested what self-image in particular belief or system or point of view, to back down means a diminishment of myself because I think I’m my image and that my image gets stuck to where I live, my bank account, my car, who my friends are, and my belief system. Which policies I go along with, which political party I belong to, and that becomes me.
Anyone who doesn’t agree with any of those things is directly attacking me. I’m not going to tolerate that. Nor will I admit I’m wrong. That would mean I would mean I’d have to change my image of myself. That’s too painful. I’ve worked too long to build it up.
Dr. Lisa: In the situation of people who are say falsely accused of a crime, you don’t necessarily have an entire group of people who were being led by somebody charismatic to convince the group that this crime has occurred or not occurred. Sometimes you have people with very disparate viewpoints and they all somehow believe the same thing until eventually, they are disproven. Why does that sort of thing happen? If you don’t have one unifying person or you don’t have a group of people who all feel the same way.
Stephen A: Well that’s happened to me because the evidence I was looking at looked persuasive. Maybe later I find out there was more evidence that wasn’t presented, or there’s another point of view I didn’t see. Maybe I realize that I’ve done something similar, even in secret and if I’m honest with myself I can see I’m not a bad person, but I see how I got into that pickle so maybe that could happen to somebody else too. Who am I to pick up the first stone?
We’re all just struggling along here trying to figure things out. Usually the more certain I am the more wrong I prove to be later because things are usually more complex than that.
Dr. Lisa: What if you’re the person who’s falsely accused?
Stephen A: Well that’s a real growing experience, but we’ve all experienced that. At some point in our life somebody important or several people important have made a judgment about us that wasn’t fair. I didn’t do it. Why won’t you listen to me? Yeah, it doesn’t feel good, but I think it happens to everyone. If we can learn how to use uncomfortable experiences to be less identified with our image, less concerned with what people think, and also recognize that we make the same mistakes. It’s hard to be tolerant of someone who’s misjudging me, but if I’m honest I’ve misjudged people. I didn’t do so with bad intentions. I just got it wrong. Sometimes they’ll come around and apologize. Sometimes they don’t. That’s life.
Somebody said to me recently that they realized that resentment was the cup of poison that they drink everyday thinking it’s going to make them better.
Dr. Lisa: In the final analysis I guess, reality is fairly subjective and we’re all walking around with our own different versions of reality and we’re all trying to understand where we’ve come from, where we’re going, where we are right now. These intersecting realities, this intersecting sort of groundlessness that could possibly lead to groundedness. Perhaps it can just help us to be a little bit more compassionate and less judgmental towards everyone else. If we know that there is this subjectivity that occurs.
Stephen A: Wouldn’t that make a better world?
Dr. Lisa: It would make a better world, yes. Dr. Aronson it’s been a pleasure to have this conversation with you. How can people find out about Mental Health Associates of Maine or the work that you’re doing?
Stephen A: They can look at the website Mental Health Associates of Maine here in Portland. Just Google it. Their phone number is 773-2828, and I believe an operator is standing by.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Dr. Stephen Aronson who is a psychotherapist with Mental Health Associates of Maine. Thank you for helping us take a different view of the world and ourselves for this time period that you and I have been talking. Hopefully people will go out into the world and continue to try to take a different view.
Stephen A: Thank you. It’s been an interesting experience. Nice talking to you.
Dr. Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 96, Viewpoint. Our guests have included Stephen Schwartz and Dr. Stephen Aronson. For more information on our guests visit doctorlisa.org.
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