healing our world

IN LIGHT OF THE SANDY HOOK TRAGEDY . . .

By Judith Barr

Below is a copy of an email I have sent out to media all over our country. For years I have been working to help heal the misuse and abuse of power and the violence that accompanies it – both blatant and subtle.

Some wonderful people in the media have been interested in helping and have interviewed me. A few have talked with me on air again and again. But as we’ve witnessed and experienced more and more public violence, it seems the media – as a mirror to society – has wanted to know less and less what is at the root of violence and how to heal it.

I will continue to put the truth out there. Perhaps what I’ve written below will call to you to send to media in your area. Or perhaps it will call you to learn and explore more yourself.

May we take real and deep steps to heal violence to the root in our country and our world.

Timely Interview Offering: UPDATE: Violence Now in Connecticut – Why Don’t We Want to Know?

Hello . . .

Individually and as a nation, we have just begun to deal with our grief over the recent mall shooting in Oregon…when yet again we are faced with another shocking and tragic event: an elementary school shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut…in my own “backyard.”

As we begin to feel another wave of grief over this most recent tragedy, we must ask ourselves: Why does it seem like people don’t want to discover the roots of violence and truly heal it? How close to home does it have to get before we open our minds and hearts to look, learn, and heal?

My name is Judith Barr, and I am a Brookfield, CT psychotherapist and author of Power Abused, Power Healed. In addition to contributing to HuffingtonPost.com, I have been interviewed in a variety of radio, TV, and print media, including, the nationally syndicated The Joey Reynolds Show, Culture Shocks With Barry Lynn, America Tonight with Kate Delaney, One On One With Steve Adubato, Financial Crisis Talk Center with Ken Gross and David Einstandig, The NAPFA Advisor, Leadership Excellence, and The Fenton Report.

If you want to take a step toward truly helping in the healing, one way would be for us to do an interview together. In that interview, I would explore with you for your audience or readers:

· What we don’t want to know about the roots of violence in any of its many forms.

· How our not knowing and exploring those roots helps to feed the violence and keep it going and growing.

· How we can help ourselves and each other turn the tides of violence around, not in a shallow, surface way, but to the root.

· That violence is not just an individual or community issue, but rather a national, multi-national, and global issue.

I look forward to hearing from you, to exploring the possibilities, and to arranging an interview.

Thank you,
Judith Barr, author, Power Abused, Power Healed
JudithBarr@PowerAbusedPowerHealed.com
https://judithbarr.com/power-abused-power-healed/

AN OPPORTUNITY TO EXPLORE FURTHER . . . NEEDLESS SUFFERING

By Judith Barr

This post is in response to a comment sent to me related to my Independence post, a comment that opens a wonderful opportunity for us to explore further our use of power.

Who gets to decide what is needless suffering?
How do they decide?
How do they decide whose suffering is less than whose and whose suffering is worse than whose?
Is the suffering of the unborn child in the process of abortion worse than the suffering of that same child
. . . born into a family that doesn’t want him/her?
. . . born to a mother who leaves the baby in the trash?
. . . born to a mother who kills herself and leaves the baby to starve?
. . . born to parents who abuse the child?
Is the child’s suffering worse than the mother’s
. . . who is pregnant through incest, rape, or some version of powerlessness?
These kinds of questions can go on and on.

Where do we each use our power well?
Where do we each misuse and abuse our power? And how do we each heal our misuse and abuse of power??
These are the questions that will guide us to ending needless suffering.

© Judith Barr, 2011

CRYING – IS IT A GAME? OR IS IT FOR REAL?

By Judith Barr


As if there weren’t enough forces in our country and our world trying to get us to not feel . . .

 

Ourselves, utilizing our own defenses to keep from feeling pain from long, long ago, as well as pain from today or even experiencing anything today that might trigger the ancient pain.

 

Other people, who do the same thing to themselves, demeaning, ridiculing, attacking, abandoning us when we do feel. Our families, employers-employees-coworkers. Our doctors, lawyers, teachers, agents, coaches, spiritual representatives.

 

Alcohol, street drugs, and pharmaceutical drugs and the companies and people who manufacture and sell them.  (If we were supported to feel our feelings and had built the capacity to do that, we wouldn’t believe we needed mind altering drugs to numb us against those feelings.) The military that wants its members to be strong and unemotional to the point of giving them propranalol to harden their defenses against the feelings that get stirred up in them by the horrors of war.  (If they weren’t hardened against the feelings, they would feel the horror and perhaps we’d finally find an alternative to war!)

 

Politicians, who appeal to the very emotions, like fear, that we try to bury and hold at bay and then use those feelings they have stirred up to their own advantage. (If we were not afraid of feeling our feelings, and if we were taught to discern which ones are here and now feelings and which are feelings from our childhood that have been triggered by something or someone in the current time . . . we wouldn’t be so needlessly vulnerable to politicians, or anyone using our own vulnerability against us.) Scientific studies that can be skewed to prove anything.

 

And the media . . . in so many different ways.

 

Last week, on a well known television show, a show I often appreciate, they did a story on tears.

 

In the story, under the guise of humor, under the guise of “science,” with a demeaning story title – The Crying Game – and under the guise of scientific backup – they did a story on “male aversion to female tears.”
 
 A study in Israel asserts that the impact on men exposed to the imperceptible scent of women’s tears is that the exposure lowers men’s testosterone levels and causes the parts of their brain that register sexual arousal to be less active. In short, the study found that imperceptible signals given off by our bodies are perceived unconsciously by others  . . . something  proven time and again. Perhaps if we truly knew ourselves and our natures, we would understand that upon witnessing the woman he loves crying,  and unconsciously perceiving the natural chemical signals she’s giving off, not only a man’s feeling self, but also his physical self receives the signal that she needs him to care, comfort, and communicate with her, not to be sexual with her, and responds accordingly.

 

Rather than emphasizing the actual findings of the study . . .  the media report of this study instead chose to make a conclusion not even remotely asserted by the study: that a women’s tears “annoy” men.
 
Thank goodness for a famous sex therapist, who talked with the reporter and told him that when his wife cries, she (the sex therapist) wanted him to ask ‘what’s the matter?’ And ‘can I help?’ and not to worry if his penis was erect! She didn’t want men to draw the wrong conclusion, using the study to prove that there’s science backing up why men are annoyed when their wives cry.

 

But the damage had already been done . . . The supposed lightness and humor with which the story was told was easy, ‘comfort’ food for those men who don’t take responsibility for themselves and their own feelings:  that the reason they’re annoyed is not from a drop in testosterone, but rather because of their discomfort with their own vulnerable feelings, or that some wound from long ago is triggered when their wife cries. 
 
And it was easy food for those women who are “trained” to please their husbands and so will try to keep from crying in the future . . . or who will use their husbands’ so-called “natural annoyance” as an excuse to keep defending against their own painful feelings.

 

And not only did the show degrade women’s tears, but at the very end, it degraded men’s tears, too, asking ‘What impact does it have on women when men cry?’ and saying it’s particularly relevant with our ‘weepy’ new Speaker of the House.

 

Look at this just one example of what we do to each other and ourselves …. Degrading women’s tears and degrading men’s tears. Degrading our vulnerability! Our real vulnerability . . . something I, as a depth psychotherapist, spend many hours, many weeks, many years working to help people rediscover and reclaim!

 

Look around us ….

People numbing themselves, unable to feel, unable to connect with themselves behind their walls and beneath their masks.

 

Without our feelings, and without allowing them and exploring them, we become automatons. And then we raise our children from those robotic modes. And we criticize and demean them for their feelings  . . . for crying as babies, for expressing hurt and fear and even anger. And we never help them build their capacity to feel.  So they grow up, not treasuring their real vulnerability, in fact afraid of it. So they grow up unnecessarily vulnerable to all the forces trying to get us not to feel.
 
Here’s the vicious cycle!

 

What have we done to our world?

How are we going to save our world?
 
By healing and safely feeling so we can rediscover and reclaim our true needed vulnerability.

 

© Judith Barr 2011

ARE WE GOING TO PUT OUT ANOTHER BRUSHFIRE? OR . . .

By Judith Barr

TSA screenings and pat downs.
Our civil rights.
Wikileaks leaks.
North Korean nukes.
The economy.
Jobs – no jobs.
Houses.
Big Pharma.
Drug firms paying doctors.
Food safety.
What to do about Iran?
Social security.
Medicare.
Taxing whom?
Cutting taxes for whom?
Who gets the next bail out?
One election begins right after the previous one takes place.
Republicans or Democrats?
Right or Left?
Far left or Tea Partyers?
Women forced to wear red bracelets when menstruating!

One after another, we put out brushfires, trying to make everything better in our world.
We ask  . . .
our doctors to do this for us
our teachers to do this for us
our clergy people to do this for us
our congress people to do this for us
our governors to do this for us
our presidents to do this for us
our media to do this for us
our military to do this for us
our money to do this for us . . .
and on and on and on.

When are we going to realize that at this level of our evolution, the only thing we can do in the outer world is put out brush fires . . .
and that we will be putting out brush fires forever, if we don’t take a leap of faith in our development …
if we don’t deal with the real cause of the forest fire that lives within each of us.
The forest fire of our own fear of our feelings, our own defenses against our feelings, our own denial of our feelings,
and our own wounds, both conscious and unconscious, burning to be healed.

© Judith Barr, 2010