Michelangelo’s Moses, Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, Italy.
Going to School
In the winter of 1996, I sit with three other students in a windowless office on the first floor of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, located on New York’s Upper East Side. All of us will graduate in a few months from Columbia University’s School of Social Work.
We have gathered this late morning with our supervisor, Dr. Sonia Austrian, as we do each week, to discuss our work with clients in the Employee Assistance Program that she oversees.
As social work interns providing employees short-term counseling, we benefit from hearing each other’s perspectiveson how best to support those who, in varying degrees, struggle with something. Those struggles include depression and anxiety, as well as concerns about relationships, parenting, illness, finances, and other experiences we call problems-in-living. We interns meet weekly to debrief and to receive feedback as we learn what to do and what not to do as budding counselors.
Discussing one particular case involving a young man with relationship difficulties, my classmates exchange perspectives on his experience, problems, and needs.
“He clearly needs longer-term therapy, Steven, argues, “We are just scratching the surface after meeting four times.”
“I agree,” says, Jodi, “He is really struggling.”
I listen for several minutes to their back and forth assessments and proposed treatment plans. Sonia keeps looking at me, waiting, I assume, for my response. Finally, her large blue eyes open wider than usual as she looks my way.
Clearing my throat,” I say, “It occurs to me that it could be a lot worse.”
Jodi and Steven look stunned. Sonia laughs. “Leave it to Allan to find a positive take on all of this,” she says.
Assessing Ideas
I am not sure whether her tone was affirming or critical. Either way, my response revealed an approach to dealing with hardships, an approach to life, really, that had been instilled in me and which I embraced.
I suppose I still do.
Which raises the question of whether it is helpful or hurtful to think in these terms—to follow Aesop and take an “It can always be worse” attitude toward human struggles, whether our own or others’.
This perspective risks being hurtful when it prompts us to minimize, gloss-over, or worse, dismiss human pain. In this case, “It can always be worse” can mean, “I don’t notice or affirm your struggles, suffering, and need of support.”
On the other hand, this take on adversity has benefits. The view that, in many cases, the magnitude of our difficulties, while significant, distressing, and surely deserving of care and support, nevertheless may not be as catastrophic as we might otherwise assume—this view can help us cope and actually feel better.
Here’s how this perspective often plays out for me.
On days when I am more symptomatic or I feel less well, it helps me to remember what I have that’s positive and good in my life and what prevents me from struggling more severely than I do. Things like, I have a steady job and access to excellent medical care, medication, and insurance that pays for both. That I can rely on a loving partner, my kind and compassionate children and parents, a supportive boss and colleagues, generous friends and neighbors. And that I have many sisters and brothers in the Parkinson’s community, too, who willingly offer their encouragement and share their own ways of coping with PD’s effects. On my difficult days, I am still quite fortunate to have all of this, and more, which, incidentally, I know many others do not have. Far from dismissing my struggles, remembering the good fortune I enjoy actually serves to help me feel better and to maintain a positive outlook on life with Parkinson’s.
Learning a Craft
Living with illness can become a craft of sorts, meaning we can get better at it the more practice we have. We learn tricks of the trade that help improve us as craftspeople. For me, getting better at the craft includes balancing the desire and need to have my struggles recognized and validated, on the one hand, and to keep them in proper perspective, on the other. This proper perspective includes reminding myself that not only could things be worse for me, but that things are already worse for others.
I don’t know if this perspective works for you, but it just might help if you give it a try.
If I could go back to that moment during my internship with Jodi, Steven, and Sonia, I would tell them I like the way Kirk Douglass put it: “No matter how bad things are, they can always be worse. So what if my stroke left me with a speech impediment? Moses had one, and he did all right.” [1]
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[1] https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a1585/learned-kirk-douglas-0401/
Photo by Fr. Barry Braum on Unsplash
Allan Cole is a professor in The Steve Hicks School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin and, by courtesy, professor of psychiatry in the Dell Medical School. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2016, at the age of 48, he serves on the Board of Directors at Power for Parkinson’s, a non-profit organization that provides free exercise, dance, and singing classes for people living with Parkinson’s disease in Central Texas, and globally via instructional videos. He also serves as a Community Advocate for ParkinsonsDisease.net, writing columns about living well with Parkinson’s. He is author or editor of 10 books on a range of topics related to bereavement, anxiety, and spirituality. His latest book, on counseling people with Parkinson’s disease, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @PDWise.