Welcome

Life Coach, Pearl Lee Schroy, Ph.D., shares about her personal struggle with her bipolar mother

For some, going home to visit family is a welcome, loving even healing experience to look forward to. For others, like myself, going home begins with the sense of a welcoming experience that quickly turns into a battlefield loaded with triggers. The way I see it, I have two options: either get shot down by all the traumatic memories and emotional hostility or take it on as my training ground as a life coach.

The following is an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote about 8 months ago during my last visit home:

“…This morning, my mother was triggered into an episode and I remembered why it can sometimes be so difficult to come home.The last thing I want to do is fall into the role of playing victim. Indeed, my question is how can I transcend the pain and not dwell in the sadness of the situation? I’m not really sure how many experiences could hurt more than the experience of being harshly judged and rejected by my own mother. I noticed as my chest became really tight and my whole body went numb. I tried to become a filter through which her force could just pass through with no resistance. When she enters that place, I watch her soul disappear, it’s as if a demon has resurrected her corpse. Who is this woman? I ask. She’s my mother. Yet I have no idea who she is. And I see she has no idea who I am. All she knows in the fiery moment is that I am her enemy so she goes into attack mode.

I feel myself disconnecting. Tears run down my face as she continues to scream at me. I call my father because I’m desperate to make it stop. In the past, I would’ve yelled back but who I am now refuses to battle and knows it would be futile. Only peace. That’s what I must bring into the space. My father lovingly reminds me that it’s her disease, not her. I pass the phone to her and she begins yelling and then changes the subject rapidly to how she needs a new music CD to listen to in the mornings, Al Green. She laughs for a second. Her sentences become incoherent. Her thoughts are fragmented and the anger begins to fragment as well.

Finally, she returns to herself and she sees my tears. She apologizes. She tells me that she loves me and I tell her I love her too. Meanwhile, all I really want to do is get on a plane and fly back to my home in Colorado that, probably by no accident, happens to be thousands of miles away.

I watch my thoughts take on the old unconscious, conditioned patterns, of not being enough, fear of all the hurtful things that she said being true, full disempowerment in my frustration of not being able to help her heal. I’m a joke, what kind of a doctor, what kind of coach am I?”

The human kind, I remind myself. I come back to the question, “How can I transcend the pain? How can I transcend the self-destructive patterns? All I want to do is run.”

This time, I’m not running. This time, I’m not surrendering to the machine created in the wake of some disease. If there is to be any hope at all, for me, and for others like me, I must rise to the challenge of reinventing myself so that I can love in the wrath of a violent storm.

I know there are many others, like myself, who are faced with the challenge of having relatives who have been diagnosed with psychiatric conditions. While it’s not easy to create and maintain healthy, loving relationships with those relatives, it is possible. The trick is to believe in the possibility and never give up. While my mother still relapses from time to time, I could write an entire book describing the leaps and bounds she has made over the years and continues to do so.

My family is living proof that there is hope. And my heart grows larger every time I choose to rise to the challenge.

If you have a story or an experience you’d like to share on this topic, I’d love to hear it.

Learning: what does it have to do with Happiness?

Learning may be more fundamental to happiness than one might initially think.
What do you think of when you think of learning? Have we evolved as a species in the way that we learn? Or could we be experiencing a crisis in learning as we advance in the realm of science and technology?

At a conference on professional life coaching and personal growth, a major theme persisted, emphasizing that it’s not so much what we learn but more the process of learning that matters in the pursuit for happiness. It would make sense to first define happiness. For different people, happiness means different things. According to Merriam-Webster, happiness is a noun referring to a state of well-being and contentment (i.e. joy) or a pleasurable, satisfying experience.

Interestingly enough, scientists have demonstrated in the laboratory that the part of the brain long agreed upon as the ‘pleasure center’ is activated during associative learning in rats (Young et al., 1998). Specifically, rats are trained to associate two neutral stimuli, a flashing light and a tone. The tone was subsequently paired with a mild footshock using standard aversive conditioning procedures. The procedure can be likened to what Pavlov demonstrated with salivation becoming the conditioned effect of the bell ringing once the sound of the bell was associated with the presentation of the delicious piece of meat. Thus, conditioning is a very basic kind of learning. In fact, I would be so bold as to suggest that associative learning is the fundamental process underlying all learning.

What Young et al. (1998) showed in their study is that learning, by itself, is rewarding. Being that the neurochemical correlate to reward is the release of dopamine in the mesolimbic dopamine system and observing such release when learning had occurred suggests that not only is there pleasure in learning, but the pleasure is designed to motivate learning. Both rats and humans experience pleasure when learning occurs. Indeed, it doesn’t even matter what the subject is learning. It can be the association between two stimuli that are in and of itself neutral and quite boring such as a flashing light and a tone. Though it’s worthwhile to note that the scientists had to first associate the tone with a mild footshock, suggesting the potential importance of the emotional system to facilitate the learning process.

Going back to the definition of happiness being an experience of pleasure, one can begin to see exactly what learning has to do with happiness. There is pleasure in learning. It makes perfect sense. Why wouldn’t we be biologically set up to find pleasure in learning? We would be in a lot of trouble if learning were absolutely un-enjoyable. Can you imagine?

So what do our moods and emotions have to do with learning? The relationship between emotions and learning is clearly seen in many modern educational systems. Did you know that, according to a UNICEF study, 60% of a child’s ability to learn is impacted by emotion? According to this study, when a child has the experience of being loved and reports being happy, they are able to learn and remember 60% more material than a child who does not have the experience of love and happiness. How interesting is it, then, that so many schools claim there are not enough resources to maintain a proper educational system? Many schools insist that children’s education suffers because of the lack of funds for supplies and technology when what they really need is love and compassion. Sadly, our children often become emotionally malnourished in modern educational systems.

Philosophers, some as prominent as Freud and Jung, have suggested that a shift in the emotional domain makes learning take off exponentially. Witnessing the crisis in learning that is happening in modern day America, it’s not difficult to see how this might be true. Indeed, when the environments of our schools do not welcome the full expression of a child’s emotional experience, there is disconnect not only from the emotions but also from the teachers and the objectives they are there to learn. This sense of disconnection carries into adulthood. One must wonder if this sense of disconnection breeds a different kind of learning, the kind that relentlessly acquires more and more knowledge, pushing the envelope of technology, leaving behind the ability to be intimately and fully connected with the experience of life.

Bottom line: Love, compassion, and being connected to our emotions impact the learning process in a way that promotes happiness. There is wisdom in our emotions that goes beyond the rational mind. It’s time we honor that wisdom and dissolve the crisis of the western mind.

Young, A.M., R.G. Ahier, et al. (1998). “Increased extracellular dopamine in the nucleus accumbens of the rat during associative learning of neutral stimuli.” Neuroscience 83(4): 1175-83.