Alumna Ashley Nash has worked through her trauma, blazing the trail for others to find healing and kindness that she didn’t always have.
For Ashley Nash, nothing is accidental. Her life is an homage to the mantra she lives by: be the person you needed when you were younger.
Today, Nash is a 27-year-old doctoral student, Saybrook alumna, twice-published author, and therapeutic art life coach. Her path has been paved by resiliency, underscored by her drive to be and do more for others as a way to right the wrongs she experienced. She has drawn inspiration from her struggles and hardships—from the moments and people that have kept her going and helped her move on.
Nash grew up in South Carolina, living in 12 different cities during her childhood. From the ages of 2 to 14, she was molested four times by four different people. She was depressed from the ages of 7 to 14 and tried to commit suicide. Her parents weren’t around much, and she had to look after her siblings.
One day when she was 11, she had so much pent-up frustration that she put it down on paper. When she showed someone what she wrote, they called it poetry.
“Writing ended up helping me the most by getting my feelings out and on paper, instead of using more negative coping methods,” Nash says. “Even if I didn’t believe that anyone wanted to hear what I had to say or what I needed to say, at least I got it out of my head.”
She started with poetry and nonfiction, until her writing got too dark. She turned to fiction then, liking the feeling of having control over the fate of her characters and the possible paths they could take. For her, the opportunity to unburden herself from her feelings and channel the energy into something else—whether through her writing or later through art therapy—offered her a way out of pain.
She also saw another way out: education. Nash went to South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, when she was 18. While there, she discovered psychology—unknowingly changing her life’s trajectory.
“I was a sophomore when I had my first psychology class,” Nash says. “I was amazed that I could learn the ins and outs of people’s minds, and understand how to help them through some strenuous or difficult things in a healthy way. When I had to go through my own trauma, I was pretty much alone, so I wanted to change this.”
Upon graduating, she realized she wanted to work in psychology, not just use it as a subset in another career. It was then she found Saybrook and began her M.A. in Counseling. While attending, she learned about art therapy, something that helped her make major breakthroughs with some difficult cases.
“It was one of my first clients as an intensive in-home therapist. She was a pregnant 14-year-old girl who witnessed her brother’s murder. She had such severe PTSD that she couldn’t even go to Walmart by herself,” Nash explains. “When we first talked to her about hobbies, she mentioned art and I was able to go back into the art therapy experiences I had. That’s what broke the barrier; I saw how something so simple as giving someone a full range of expression could open someone up. It’s almost like she thought, ‘I did something crazy on this paper, and she did not judge me—maybe she’s okay to talk to.’”
Her Saybrook education informed who she would be as a practitioner. When she was ending her master’s program, she had an ectopic pregnancy with two weeks left in the program. She lost the baby and her fallopian tube and had to have massive surgery. Throughout the experience, however, her Saybrook community was there for her.
“Once you have this education and have the opportunity to help people that are going through something difficult you just help them, innately. It’s on instinct, not out of academic obligation. That’s what my Saybrook professors did,” Nash says. “To the professors I had at the time, it wasn’t a grand decision to help me. It’s was just like, ‘Okay, this is what you need.’ And that meant so much.”
With the kindness she found in this experience, she saw a way to further help others. It made her want to educate other counselors, to be the type of professor she had at Saybrook—one that can be both educator and supporter.
Upon graduating in 2018, Nash started her Ph.D. in Counselor Education at North Carolina State University and works as a graduate assistant at the counseling center on campus. In addition to eventually becoming a professor, Nash—who worked three jobs while completing her Saybrook degree—has already published two books (her latest was published in 2018), became a certified therapeutic art life coach this past summer, now runs a social media outreach called N.A.S.H. (Not All Scars Heal), and has even bigger plans.
“I want to open up a mental health wellness center and get people in the community involved so they can see what mental health care actually is, not what they think it is. I want to help break down the stigma surrounding mental health,” Nash says.
From her writing to her mission to give people the resources she didn’t have in the wake of her own trauma, Nash is poised to be the person scores of people need—the person she needed when she was younger.
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Unbound Posts
Breaking the Silence
Arielle Dance, Ph.D., is using her education to challenge taboos around women’s health and mindfulness in the workplace.
Mind-Body Medicine alumna Arielle Dance, Ph.D., has long been an advocate for women’s health.
She’s served as a doula, supporting and assisting women before, during, and after the birthing process. She has helped fight cancer through her work as a volunteer, intern, and now manager at the American Cancer Society (ACS). And she has dedicated countless hours to researching innovative techniques that can ease the physical and mental pain caused by endometriosis, a disease she was diagnosed with at 15 years old.
Through it all, she’s striven to break down the stigmas that surround unconventional treatments and preventative care.
“I’ve always had women coming to me and asking about my research, or what types of breathing exercise might be able to help them with a certain issue,” Dr. Dance says. “I will get text messages from someone asking if I will reach out to someone else they know, whether it be their co-worker, or cousin, or friend who needs help.”
After earning her master’s degree in women’s health, Dr. Dance chose to continue her education at Saybrook University because it was the only graduate school she found willing to support her unconventional research interests. In 2015, her choice paid off: she was awarded the Herbert Spiegel Scientific Poster Award for her research poster titled “The Utilization of Hypnosis, Hypnotherapy, and HypnoBirthing for Childbirth and Labor.”
Throughout her time at the Saybrook, she continued to study how specific relaxation techniques including meditation, deep breathing, and guided imagery could positively affect different aspects of women’s health—specifically endometriosis, which often results in infertility.
Today, she finds that her research continues to attract a diverse range of women seeking to learn more about her nontraditional methods of treatment
“Besides my full-time job, I am balancing roles as a doula and unofficial consultant,” Dr. Dance says. “Because of my final dissertation on endometriosis, I have found a lot of people reaching out to me specifically related to their pain and how they can cope with their pain and infertility. I have begun to do less work with women who are having babies and more with women who are trying to have babies, who can’t have children or are dealing with pelvic pain. It’s been a unique group of women all in different phases.”
Dance has also used her education to help transform the culture in her day-to-day work at the ACS. She has begun integrating techniques she learned during her time at Saybrook to increase mindfulness in the workplace, where she manages a team of employees. She recalls how she was initially told by colleagues and friends to stay away from using words like meditation in corporate settings because the way some people may react to the terminology, “Instead, they might prefer something like ‘stress management techniques’,” she says.
But after attending a management academy that called for bringing more mindfulness to the workplace, she saw an opportunity to begin sharing some techniques with her staff.
“It’s definitely something that is beginning to change,” says Dr. Dance, joking that as soon as people heard that Google was using it to increase productivity in the workplace it became much more acceptable. “So I took that opportunity to begin shifting the language and introducing some of the skills I had learned, and it has worked out really well.”
She now routinely begins staff meetings with mediation. She also uses aromatherapy and dim lighting in her office to help her begin each day. “Before they even knock on my door, everyone knows I’m meditating first thing when I walk in.”
Down the road, she hopes to use her research and experience to possibly begin her own business focused on coaching and advising women who are struggling with health concerns. Until then, she is committed to bringing awareness to the issues she is passionate about by speaking up.
“My degree from Saybrook is kind of unconventional,” Dr. Dance says. “And what I am doing is unconventional. My original research is still kind of stigmatized because it is very much about every female topic possible, and every taboo topic that a woman could talk to a male-identified person about. But it is important that we continue to talk about these issues so we can bring the pain that so many people are experiencing to the surface, and then work to help them heal.”
Bringing the Outdoors in
I look around my office and see four plants without turning my head, a wall sheathed in bright, natural colors, with a white board surrounded by natural wood. I recently learned that the flowers in my office are routinely cared for and changed with the season. On the 19th floor of our building, we have an atrium with a windowed ceiling to give the appearance of the outdoors, all to enhance the worker experience. Am I happier than the average worker because of my surroundings? Research suggests this just may be the case, and biophilia, the human tendency to interact or be closely associated with nature, could explain why.
We spend about 90 percent of our time in a “built environment”—at home and at work—and it is no secret that the walls surrounding us have progressively taken us out of nature. We spent thousands of years evolving in nature, relying on the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water, but now we’ve removed ourselves, supplementing the elements with technology and modified substitutions. As we have moved into a life spent mostly indoors, biophilic design seeks to rectify the disconnect between outdoors and in.
Biophilic design traces its roots to E.O. Wilson’s 1984 book “Biophilia.” Wilson was a biologist and research professor at Harvard University, when he outlined the innate tendency of humans to be attracted to nature and crave natural structures in everyday life. This provided the guiding principle for biophilic design: to create architecture and interior design that is an extension of nature.
Molly Stillwell, who has an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Psychology from Saybrook University and is currently a Ph.D. student in Saybrook’s Transformative Social Change program, found particular interest in biophilic design. When she arrived at Saybrook, she intended to study environmental psychology with a focus on transformative social change. She ended up combining her interests in the environment and social consciousness through an independent study, which led her to explore biophilia and the long-standing relationship of the environment and humans.
“There’s no separation between ourselves and the natural world around us,” Stillwell says. “This is an important part of our lives and always has been. Our relationship with nature was part of our survival mechanism. One of the most important collaborations was with the world around us, because if we didn’t listen to and pay attention to it, we weren’t going to survive.”
Our relationship with nature was part of our survival mechanism. One of the most important collaborations was with the world around us, because if we didn’t listen to and pay attention to it, we weren’t going to survive.
Should nature come inside?
A study from the Journal of Happiness Studies found that psychological health is directly correlated with nature relatedness, with nine in 10 office workers reporting improved well-being after incorporating natural elements. Yet in office buildings often dictated by cubicles and personal computers, it is easy to see how the relationship with nature may have been forgotten. “We feel like we can be so separate because we’ve removed ourselves so much, but then we realize something is missing,” Stillwell says.
Perhaps that missing link is causing the problems we see, including stress. The World Health Organization has dubbed stress the “health epidemic of the 21st century.” A recent study from Korn Ferry suggests that much of this comes from the workplace. Seventy-six percent of respondents said that workplace stress “had a negative impact on their personal relationships,” and 66 percent lost sleep due to work-related stress. A stunning 16 percent have quit jobs because the stress became too overwhelming, yet we seem to be at a loss for long-term solutions.
With biophilic design, we can address some of this stress and disconnect by simply changing the interiors of office buildings. Research suggests that by effectively recreating nature indoors, one can reduce stress and restore energy levels with the same impact as real contact with nature. By simply introducing more plants into an office space, productivity increased by 15 percent.
In the workplace, the importance of these natural elements has been proven to make a difference over and over again. In an office of 90 people, a study found that workers who had a window that afforded a view of nature recovered from low-level stress at a much quicker rate than those who only had a view of a blank wall. Further, the longer participants spent looking out the window at nature, the more quickly their heart rate tended to decrease.
Stillwell explains how biophilic design seems to work in tandem with mindfulness to focus on the holistic health of the individual.
“I think that the rise of mindfulness is really connected to bringing more awareness to our lives and the connections that we have. When you boil it down, it isn’t all about the connections that we have just with other people, but to our environment—to the space in which we’re living,” she says. “As we move from focusing on simply surviving, mindfulness allows us to say, ‘Wow, we’re experiencing some disruption and dysfunction in our life, why is that, why am I feeling depressed when I have everything on paper that I could want?’ I think the more we look internally we realize we’re missing some fundamental connection in our life, and that is to the natural world,” Stillwell says.
I think that this emergence of biophilic design is one of the best things that we can do because it’s bringing together technology and the natural world
The importance of letting the outdoors in
One of the guiding tenets of biophilic design is spirit of place, and the ways that designers and architects attempt to create this spirit are varied—from natural light, ventilation, and quality of view, to natural materials, spaciousness, green walls, plants, and even pet-friendly work places. Businesses are increasingly adopting the design principles.
“I think that this emergence of biophilic design is one of the best things that we can do because it’s bringing together technology and the natural world,” Stillwell says. “People are not going to give up technology. We’re not going to give up our societies and go live in the forest, it’s just not very likely. But finding that middle path, I think, is always the most effective answer.”
As we explore this middle path, the design will continue to have to evolve because the built world continues to segregate from the natural world. Unemployment rates are the lowest they’ve been in 50 years, and depression rates are higher than they’ve ever been. It’s hard not to imagine these two things could be related.
A study by Human Spaces shows that 58 percent of office workers report they do not have live plants in the office and 47 percent report having no natural light. With the United Nations predicting that by 2050 68 percent of the world’s population will live in urban environments, the imperative for biophilic design continues to grow.
“We must remember to care about our happiness, instead of just surviving,” Stillwell says. “The natural world is a fundamental piece of that happiness. We just haven’t always related to it that way.”
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CBD: What Can’t It Cure?
Gummies, pain relieving lotion, sleeping masks, beer, hamburgers, coffee, tea, essential oils, mascara, bath bombs, chocolate, pet treats, face serums, and water—what do all these have in common? They’ve been infused with CBD (cannabidiol). CBD is taking over, no matter the product, no matter the industry.
CBD is a derivative of marijuana and hemp. It does not contain THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the psychoactive component of the cannabis plant, but is promoted as a way to produce the relaxation and soothing feelings found in cannabis consumption. Relatively new to the market, and still involved in legal murkiness, the uses and benefits can get confusing and hard to prove.
It seems as though pharmacy companies and venture capitalists with deep pockets haven’t decided if CBD is worth their interests, and by doing so, may have stifled studies on the effectiveness. As a faculty member of Saybrook University’s Integrative and Functional Nutrition (IFN) program and nutrition specialist, Lori Taylor expresses concern with a new product that doesn’t have the research backing for implementation.
It’s really hard to assess something’s effectiveness when you don’t know how much of it to take, and there simply haven’t been enough studies.
“I’m really happy to see these medicines coming up, I just wish we had a little bit more of an idea on how to start using it,” she says. “We don’t know enough about dosing—for instance what’s the milligrams-per-thousand that provides the most effective pain control? It’s really hard to assess something’s effectiveness when you don’t know how much of it to take, and there simply haven’t been enough studies.”
While research is lacking, anecdotal evidence has shown that CBD can help with everything from PTSD, to anxiety, pain, Multiple Sclerosis, and even epilepsy. A recent Gallup poll found that four in 10 Americans think that CBD should be legally available for adults over-the-counter, and nearly two in three indicated that they have some familiarity with CBD. It is a quickly growing business, and if predictions are right, the industry is on the verge of a major boom.
According to a study by investment research firm Cowen & Co., the CBD market generates $2 billion in annual sales currently. By 2025, the study projects the number of Americans using CBD will grow to 10 percent and generate $16 billion in sales. Will the promise of more sales be what it takes to conduct more studies?
“The medicines really do have a whole lot of promise. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get it into more people’s hands, get more studies done, and have more medical practitioners take it seriously,” Taylor says. “I do have my worries. It’s going to be a big moneymaker; I don’t want it to get so expensive that it’s beyond the range for most people. That’s a real plus with CBD right now, it’s not that expensive.”
CBD, in most of its varied forms, is reasonably priced and available at the local drug store or gas station, making accessibility another benefit for the large swath of the population that doesn’t have access to insurance and, in effect, a doctor or prescription.
A much needed alternative
Americans are looking for more alternative treatments for holistic healing, ways to treat the body without the harsh effects of some medicines, or the addictive qualities of opiates. In pain management, for instance, there is usually a short ladder of products that can quickly lead to opiates. For Taylor, she witnessed this firsthand, which is another reason she believes in the promise of CBD to treat pain management.
“I went through a period last year where I had some really bad back pain and I was first offered over-the-counter stuff,” she says. “From there, it went to muscle relaxers, then steroids, and finally opiates—and personally I cannot tolerate opiates, but also, we know opiates are super problematic. With these medications coming forward, we may have another option that can help slow the path to opioids. We’ve got to find better things and I think CBD and cannabis medicines may help.”
CBD may also go beyond just simply slowing the path to opioids: a recent study suggests that CBD can also help reduce stress and cravings among those currently addicted to opioids. And while Taylor is quick to mention that if a medicine is strong enough to have an effect then it’s strong enough to have a side-effect, it doesn’t appear that CBD has the same addictive tendencies as other drugs. The World Health Organization reported in 2018 that they found no negative public health effects or public abuse potential.
Yet the stigma surrounding cannabis-related medicines reaches deep into the medical field.
As an oncology nutritionist, Taylor has seen this before with medical marijuana. She found doctors and pharmacists alike unwilling to learn about the treatment options and veracity of benefits of medical marijuana that their patients were experiencing, and believes this is the case with CBD, as well. “I think it’s really underutilized by medical professionals and perhaps over utilized by the public. All cannabis medicines are underutilized by medical professionals, in my opinion,” says Taylor.
Taylor adds that in the field of integrative and functional medicine, there is a tool called “Evidence Risk Grading.” The tool precludes that sometimes there may not be a lot of evidence or research about something, but if the risk is really low, it’s worth a try. In the case of CBD, this may be the guiding principle. Specifically in the case of anxiety, Taylor believes it has a lot of promise for adolescents and adults alike with much lower side effects than treatments that are currently available.
While CBD may be oversaturating the market with uses that may not be practical, the way to fight stigma is by making it everyday, nominal, or something that everyone uses in one way or another. Moving the perception of CBD into a true, respected alternative treatment for chronic illnesses like pain and anxiety may be a long way away, but perhaps one way to continue the conversion is through the bustling business that all these products are creating.
The market that these products are creating will hopefully fight the stigma and encourage more verifiable research and long-term studies on CBDs efficacy. These studies will be able to tell us if it really is worth the hype. For now, we will have to eat our own gummies, rub some pain lotion on what aches us, enjoy a beer, and take our own word for if it works or not.
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A Corporate Coming-of-Age
In 2017, 56 million millennials were working or looking for work in the U.S., officially replacing Generation X as the largest workforce. This type of generational shift is not new, and, in fact, is impossible to avoid—time remains undefeated.
But, as opposed to race or gender, rarely does generational diversity come to mind when considering the demographics that make up a company or organization. However, with a generational shift currently underway, it is something more companies are being forced to address.
For companies seeking to remain inclusive, diverse, and competitive, these moments can present a great opportunity for reflection and organizational growth.
Telecommuting benefits are now offered by roughly 60 percent of organizations, as opposed to just 20 percent in 1996—and surveys show it is most appealing to both millennials and employees 55 and older (a blend of baby boomers and Generation X).
Rethinking talent recruitment and employee retention
Simone DiMatteo, a business operations manager and Saybrook student in the Ph.D. in Managing Organizational Systems program, is researching how generational shifts can impact talent retention within organizations for her dissertation.
“In 2015, the figure for turnover costs was $30.5 billion—today, it sits at $600 billion,” DiMatteo says, citing Work Institute’s 2018 Retention Report. The report estimates turnover costs could reach nearly $680 billion by 2020 and may be influenced by millennials becoming the most likely generation to job-hop. “For my research, it is important to understand whether generations of employees are more influenced by generational theory or whether their motivation is more driven by where they are at in their career arc, which could be correlated across generations.”
DiMatteo manages a team of five—each person from a different generation—and is focusing her research on motivational factors for employees that an organization can influence, such as compensation, career development, or job security.
“I want to know if certain factors are more important to specific generations,” she says. “You would imagine that for someone headed toward retirement, security might be more important, but it isn’t necessarily true. Security might mean something completely different to a younger generation, like millennials, who are coming out of school with more student loan debt than ever before.”
Companies can use this knowledge to alter their recruitment and employee retention strategies to place greater emphasis on what matters most to employees most.
For example, health care plans and 401(k) accounts were staples of employee benefits in the 1990s as a recruitment and retention strategy. However, while each are still popular, Roth 401(k)s have become increasingly common in place of the traditional 401(k). In another example, telecommuting benefits are now offered by roughly 60 percent of organizations, as opposed to just 20 percent in 1996—and surveys show it is most appealing to both millennials and employees 55 and older (a blend of baby boomers and Generation X).
Organizations that are able to restructure benefit packages to meet the demands of shifting generational demographics can position themselves well to attract and retain talent of any age.
The best way to approach these situations, not surprisingly, is with respect.
Generations are essentially a collective group comprised of millions of individuals who share formative experiences (such as world events and technological, economic, and social shifts) that shape the way in which they see the world. In a work setting, this can sometimes cause conflict and negatively impact an organization’s culture and production.
David Galowich, a Forbes contributor and executive coach, provides an example of this in his article, “The Business Leader’s Guide to Communication Across Generations”.
“I had a coaching situation in an organization recently where a baby boomer kept leaving voicemails for a millennial, and the millennial would only respond using text. The boomer was frustrated about the inability to have a verbal conversation, and the millennial was irritated that he had to constantly pick up voicemails for things that he felt could easily be handled with a quick text.”
The best way to approach these situations, not surprisingly, is with respect. For managers and fellow employees, it’s important to remain open-minded to the way others may be comfortable completing tasks and consider facilitating in-person conversations about the best way to find a middle ground moving forward.
It is also important to be cognizant of generational stereotypes. For example, while there may be a perception amongst baby boomers and Generation X that millennials lack a strong work ethic, there is little validity to this argument. In fact, there is research that may prove the opposite is true.
A study from ManpowerGroup reported that roughly 20 percent of millennials are holding down two jobs; another by Project: Time Off and GfK found they were more likely to identify as “work martyrs” and take less time off than other generations. And technology has enabled employees of all generations to remain connected every hour of every day, blurring the perception of what can truly be classified as “on the clock”.
To get ahead of interpersonal issues that may arise from generational differences, organizations may consider implementing mentoring programs—which can go both ways. This can bridge a divide between both younger and elder generations by encouraging them to share knowledge of how they perceive the workplace and explain different methods they have found to be most effective for their work.
Transferring knowledge
Mentorship programs that bridge generational divides can also be a powerful tool to address another challenge of this type of demographic shift in the labor force: institutional knowledge loss.
The BLS projects the number of workers over the age of 55 to more than double (from 12 to 25 percent of the labor force) by the year 2024. And, currently, nearly half of workers age 55 or older work in management positions. But eventually these workers will retire, and take with them much of their expertise.
“It’s one of the expenses that can be difficult to quantify for an organization,” DiMatteo says, “Somebody that has been in an organization for five or 10 years—even their entire career—when they walk away that can be a major loss for an organization.”
One story published in the Harvard Business Review claims an organization estimated that a retirement wave of 700 employees would amount to over 27,000 years of experience lost.
In addition to mentoring programs that can encourage the organic transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next, companies can also mitigate this risk through some type of knowledge repository. This can be developed by formally documenting processes and procedures with the goal of enhancing the onboarding process for new employees or easing the transition process upon someone’s retirement or departure from a company.
The next generation
Generation Z is just beginning to enter the labor force, and will soon begin to put their own unique spin on it. One day, they will be pushed aside by Generation Alpha. This shouldn’t be seen as a problem, but rather an opportunity that forces organizations in every generation to find better ways to incorporate and include diverse age populations, because that is who makes up the workforce. Every generation will continue to bring a unique influence to the way organizations function. But the best organizations will remain proactive and willing to adapt.
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Mindfulness Over Matter
In the final moments of 13 Reasons Why’s first season, Hannah Baker, the main protagonist of the series, steps into a bathtub, slits her wrists, and dies alone. The camera doesn’t pan away, doesn’t offer any respite from the horror that unfolds onscreen. It’s gruesome by design, and incredibly difficult to watch.
This scene played out on Netflix screens big and small for the past two years. But after a 2019 study confirmed that 13 Reasons Why led to a 28.9 percent increase in suicide rates among U.S. youth ages 10 to 17 in April 2017, Netflix finally announced that it made the decision to cut the scene entirely. Now it goes from Hannah looking in the mirror to her mother finding her body.
The released data indicates the phenomenon of suicide contagion—the process in which the suicide of one person or multiple people can contribute to a rise in suicidal behaviors among others. The concern with suicide contagion is that it suggests that suicide is a viable or realistic option to escape pain. In the case of 13 Reasons Why, it was the graphic suicide scene coupled with Hannah’s perceived lack of options that created a perfect storm: teenagers were visually shown a way out, but not a path forward.
“Adolescents are really good at making rational decisions when their full cognitive processes are fully connected,” says Dominique Avery, Ph.D., a faculty member in Saybrook’s Counseling department. “The problem is that they get hijacked by emotions so much more easily than adults. Adolescent brains are imbalanced due to differing rates of development in various parts of the brain. Adolescent brains are more sensitive to emotional cues and social pressures. As a result, they are more likely to react from the impulsive, reward-seeking, and emotional subcortical areas (limbic system) rather than accessing the rational, decision making prefrontal cortex under times of stress. You could think that everything’s going fine with a teen but then something triggers them and they’re not able to look at long-term consequences.”
It’s not necessarily the media that’s the fiend: risk factors can include bullying, stressful or traumatic life events, anxiety disorders, feelings of disconnection, or substance abuse. The media can actually be helpful in showing adolescents that options beyond suicide do exist. And while peer groups, family systems, and schools are valuable resources, teaching teens how to regulate their emotions and conquer that impulsivity is just as important.
Mind-body practices help people cope with unmerciful treatment, a crisis, or other personal trauma, by bringing people back in relation to themselves.
Emotional regulation = mindfulness
“A big part of mindfulness is about emotional regulation,” Dr. Avery explains.
Teaching mindfulness practices—and in turn, helping students with emotional regulation—can be a key preventative tool. If the brain is retrained, and a person learns emotional regulation, then they’re more likely to be able to sit with an uncomfortable emotion, process it, and move on. Because of this, adolescents can learn to regulate when experiencing adverse periods like hyper-arousal (the fight-or-flight response, with feelings of anxiety, panic, and racing thoughts) or hypo-arousal (a freeze response, characterized by feelings of emotional numbness, paralysis, and disassociation).
You may think of traditional mindful practices as breathing exercises or other sensory-grounding experiences. In Dr. Avery’s “Advanced Child and Adolescent Counseling” course, she uses some unconventional methods—like glitter bottles, stress balls, bubble blowing, and calming scents—to help children learn some grounding techniques for when they start to experience a fight-or-flight response. This response is a survival mechanism that allows humans to respond quickly to life-threatening situations, but can now occur from not life-threatening stressors (and can in turn contribute to anxiety and depression).
“Breathing has a huge impact on the vagus nerve, which regulates our autonomic nervous system,” Dr. Avery says. “The vagus nerve controls our heart, lungs, digestive system, and even the tension in our pelvic floor—so everything related to that fight-or-flight response system. If we can learn to calm the fight-or-flight response, then that’s going to lead to better emotional regulation.”
This is not to say these practices don’t help in a crisis situation. Darlene Viggiano, Ph.D., adjunct faculty in Saybrook’s Mind-Body Medicine department, extrapolates on the long-term benefits of mindfulness during and after a traumatic experience, including larger mind-body practices.
“Mind-body practices help people cope with unmerciful treatment, a crisis, or other personal trauma, by bringing people back in relation to themselves,” Dr. Viggiano says. “The mind and body are one, but since the time of Descartes, they’ve been treated almost as opposites, which was in itself a trauma to humankind.”
One example of mind-body intervention was with the healing of Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) students following the school shooting on Feb. 14, 2018, in Parkland, Florida.
Studies are clear: surviving school shootings not only negatively impacts academic performance, but can also lead to trauma. According to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 28 percent of people who witness an American mass shooting develop PTSD. These repeated cycles of stress, much like the fight-or-flight response mentioned above, can lead to long-term consequences for the mind.
The summer after the shooting at MSD, the Broward County Public Schools partnered with the Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) to create the Comprehensive Wellness Program. To start, they had 180 teachers and service providers across Broward County participate in the Professional Training Program in Mind-Body Medicine, teaching them “the biology and psychology of stress and trauma alongside a comprehensive set of mind-body medicine techniques.”
CMBM also piloted a four-week, mind-body medicine curriculum for all 130 MSD peer counselors, focusing on stress reduction and self-regulation. By the third week, 98 percent of the students who participated slept better, focused more effectively, and were able to cope with panic attacks. These students now will go on to help 3,200 of their peers, effectively creating a wide peer support network and starting the healing process.
“Mind-body medicine definitely has a role in crisis response in terms of being able to get people settled and get them in a space where they’re able to start processing,” Dr. Avery says. “If it’s something that’s been a part of their practice, then it’s going to be so much easier to get there. For people who don’t have really solid emotional regulation, it’s going to be much harder to move out of that initial crisis response phase.”
Trauma-informed schools help with crisis response
Even though mind-body medicine can be helpful in crisis situations, the trauma first needs to be identified. If a crisis isn’t as universal as a school-wide shooting, and is more personal to the individual student (like experiencing bullying or violence at home), spotting trauma and providing the student with resources can be tricky.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) is a term used to describe the abuse, neglect, and other traumatic experiences that can happen to people under the age of 18. According to the CDC-Kaiser ACE study, dealing with early adversity is related to the following negative future outcomes: physical ailments, unintended pregnancy, STDs, cancer, diabetes, alcohol and drug abuse, mental health disorders, and suicide.
For schools, trauma-informed care (TIC) is a way to combat ACEs. This type of training teaches teachers, support staff, and administrators to recognize the behavioral, emotional, and inter-relational symptoms of trauma, and how to address it. It can be as simple as shifting the language of a question, from “what’s wrong with you?” to “what happened to you?”
Dr. Avery explains the impact ACEs can have by using the example of a traumatized second grader. The child comes to school feeling irritable because of circumstances at home, and because of this, they react disproportionately to what a teacher considers to be a reasonable request. That’s where the trouble begins for teachers with a lack of trauma training.
“What we see in schools is a teacher who feels their authority is being challenged and comes down with an even harder consequence,” Dr. Avery explains. “The child, who doesn’t know how to self-regulate, starts to escalate. It turns into a vicious cycle where staff doesn’t approach students from a trauma-informed way, and kids are suspended or expelled from school because of their trauma-related behavioral issues as a result.”
Little data exists on just how many schools in America are trauma-trained. In August 2018, Denver public schools received a $1 million donation to train teachers in how to understand and respond to trauma. Washington State and Massachusetts both have systematic frameworks in place to enact training into schools to help traumatized students. The state departments of education in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts all include resources to address trauma.
The results are beyond promising though: at Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, Washington—which is the subject of the 2015 documentary Paper Tigers—the school had 90 percent fewer suspensions, a threefold increase in college-bound students, and a fivefold increase in graduation rates after incorporating trauma-informed practices.
For kids, having trauma-informed teachers can mean the difference between being re-traumatized or being understood and cared for. It can help them see options where none previously existed. And for kids that are taught mindfulness exercises as more of a preventative measure, it can set them on a clear path forward.
Conversations don’t inevitably begin and end when the school bell tolls. Suicide will remain a reality in communities, across the country, and around the globe—and there will always be a larger conversation about it in the media, even if it retreats to the back of a news cycle. For now, mindfulness can be the starting point to developing a more widespread effort to address trauma.
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What does self care really mean?
Before self-care was synonymous with face masks and bubble baths, and the hashtag spurred more than 16.5 million Instagram posts, self-care existed primarily as a means of survival.
In the 1970s and 1980s minority and queer communities used self-care as an act of self-preservation. At a time when minority and queer communities were overlooked, underserved, and forgotten, the practice of self-care was essential for their health.
Yet self-care has proliferated since 2016, powered by a different group: white, upper-class women. After the tumultuous 2016 election, people were at a loss of what to do. Faced with never-ending vitriol during the campaign season, people didn’t know how to cope—and turned to self-care for answers. “The Critical Role of Self-Care for Handling Post-Election Stress”, “The Election Self-Care Detox”, “Soak, Steam, Spritz: It’s All Self-Care” were all published by major news outlets in just a three-month span.
As self-care has become more popular lately, it has been influenced by capitalistic culture. Instead of signaling a shift from the dominant system, it returned to it. We interviewed two Saybrook Mind-Body Medicine faculty members—Cliff Smyth, Ph.D., and Laura Witte, Ph.D.—to discuss the true meaning of self-care, the problematic nature of its commercialization, and why in the end, community care may be the future.
Q: Thanks for speaking with us today. What does self-care mean to each of you?
A: Dr. Smyth: For me, self-care starts with the capacity to notice when things are going awry and what somebody can do with it. A lot of it starts with awareness and a lot of that awareness starts with bodily experiences, because emotions show up in the body.
A: Dr. Witte: For the general population, when we talk about wellness, most people think of taking care of yourself in general such as exercise and eating health. For me, I believe in the holistic approach which is, mind, body, and spirit.
Self-care almost always involves some clear positive intentions, commitment of time, and focused attention.
Q: Before you can know what works best for yourself in terms of self-care, you need to know yourself. How can people go about finding what self-care means to them?
A: Dr. Witte: As we evolve and get clearer on what it is that we’re looking for that brings us fulfillment in life, we start to explore options and find what works for us. But some people just get so caught up in the rat race of life that they don’t focus on what’s really important to them.
If something happens, many people are looking for an immediate fix to relieve the discomfort. Perhaps it’s a job loss and they go find another one and start this new job tomorrow, but it’s not actually what they want. When we can take a look at the bigger picture and explore, it’s a great starting point for some self-evaluation. Questions to ask oneself could be “what do I want to create for my home life/family, career, emotional support, and spiritual guidance?” If I could create my ideal life, what would it look like and how can I “give back” in a meaningful way?
A: Dr. Smyth: After some self-evaluation, people can develop criteria on what’s going to get them the most benefits. So taking some time out, like doing a manicure-pedicure may be that you’re just not on your phone, you’re not doing emotional labor, you’re taking some time for yourself, to reflect a bit about your life. And there may be some health enhancing qualities to doing something like that.
Self-care doesn’t have to be sophisticated. You can ask yourself: is it creating relaxation? Is it creating a space to reflect on one’s life without ruminating? Is it helping you sleep? Is it helping you make better diet and exercise choices? If yes, then it’s probably self-care. Self-care almost always involves some clear positive intentions, commitment of time, and focused attention.
Q: What do you think of the commercialization of self-care, of the face masks and bubble baths that are frequently a part of marketing messages?
A: Dr. Smyth: The whole thing is that the space between pampering yourself and developing a substantial meditation practice has now been occupied somewhat by the monetization of self-care practices, which makes it complicated.
A: Dr. Witte: I think things like face masks and bubble baths are the Hallmark answers. Those are things that anybody can enjoy but it just doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. Whatever the situation is for the individual, we need to get to the source of the problem to ultimately find our own joy and happiness. This is different for everyone. That’s why it’s such an individualized path for all of us to explore.
Q: Beyond the glamour of the current idea of “self-care”, there are also political components. For example, for some people, it’s necessary for people to practice self-care to prevent the need for medical services.
A: Dr. Witte: Allopathic medicine doesn’t solve everyone’s problems. It’s a piece of the puzzle. When we partner with our holistic counterparts, we can help patients on a much deeper level.
One of the biggest barriers that people face in getting help is financial. Even with health insurance, there are still pay co-pays and deductibles. And if someone wants to get to the root of the problem and address it from a holistic standpoint, insurance usually does not cover this. For example, if someone wants to see a naturopathic physician or an acupuncturist, this would often be an out-of-pocket expense. But this may give the client the relief and answers they are looking for.
I think things like face masks and bubble baths are the Hallmark answers. Those are things that anybody can enjoy but it just doesn’t get to the heart of the issue.
Q: As a retort of sorts, the same communities that originally brought about self-care have reenergized the idea of community care, where communities step up to look after one another—prompted by the same problem these communities faced in the 1970s. Now that the pre-packaged, commercialized self-care is proving to be less effective for treating problems, how does the concept of community care play into the future?
A: Dr. Smyth: It’s fundamentally human to find ways to take care of each other. Research shows that the person who gives, benefits a lot, sometimes even more than the receiver. It’s political but it’s also somewhat spiritual.
I can really see this in some places and pockets in America where, without communities and without strong families, people would really be in trouble. Unfortunately, there are places where people don’t have strong families or communities and that’s where you need policy, funding, and people reconnecting to the idea of community care to build that support back up.
I think of examples: my wife and I both had surgeries a few years ago, and we didn’t have each other to help. Luckily, we had friends around who were willing to help. Every night for a month after each of us had surgery, somebody came around and dropped off a meal. We were very fortunate.
This is a social shift though, accepting that self-care alone is inadequate. It’s a fad for now, and hopefully we can move into more long-term solutions, like community care. Community care is important to talk about now and into the future.
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Being human in the 21st century
Famed psychologist Carl Rogers used a powerful analogy to describe the human longing to be whole. If potatoes are left alone in a dark cellar, they will still do what potatoes will do. They will sprout! Even in the dark, they will grow in distorted ways, toward whatever light they can find. It may result in a very mutated looking plant, but nevertheless they long for the light.
This is a great analogy to what it is that we, as humans, long for: wholeness. It is what humanistic psychology has always been about—coming into wholeness out of an experience of feeling broken. When we feel like we are only allowed or permitted to be pieces of ourselves in relationships, in workplaces, and at home, we feel claustrophobic and small, and we desire to be more of who we are, genuinely and authentically. We may never be completely whole our entire lives, but we are always moving toward that end, carried by our longing. Intimate, healthy, and loving relationships provide the light that we need to nourish emerging wholeness. When others can accept us non-judgmentally for who we are, we give ourselves permission to do the same with ourselves. We then change in ways that align with our longing.
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
– Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy
This longing has been present since we awoke into self-awareness. I think of the existential psychologist Rollo May and how he emphasized that we have self-awareness, acutely aware that our time on this earth is finite. Rollo felt that only humans have this awareness, although the mourning behaviors and apparent rituals for the deceased by elephants gives me pause to wonder if we are truly the only species that knows about the apparent finality of death.
Nevertheless, one might say that human beings are distinct in their potential to channel the intense anxiety of being finite into creative potential. We suffer because we long for more time, but this suffering drives us toward greatness in the time we have. It pushes us to be our very best self.
However, it can also immobilize us. Our capacity for freedom of choice also means that we can choose to waste our time. We addictively engage in activities and pursuits that merely distract us for a time from the awareness that we have one chance to live well. Rather than face the terror that we might choose poorly, we take escape routes, numbing ourselves to the intensity of human feelings and experience through excessive engagement with substances and entertainment pursuits. Ironically, this avoidance seems to engender the outcome most feared—not living fully and well as human beings.
I also think of Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who contributed a somewhat more spiritual and mystical piece to this existential perspective. In Frankl’s view, we are all born with unique gifts. We must be able to search and grapple for a sense of personal meaning so that we can contribute these gifts in the unique way we are each called upon to do in only the way that we can.
Frankl emphasized that to find the true meaning of our lives, we must confront the “existential vacuum”—the sense that life is meaningless and that inside, we may be without any real substance. We can experience despair in the face of rampant materialism, consumerism, environmental devastation, violence and hate crimes, and isolation engendered by the breakdown of intimate relationships. In order to feel like we are living a worthwhile life, we feel pressured to live up to societal expectations while not even being completely certain of the exact nature of those standards, or how to navigate them when they are contradictory.
The challenge of the 21st century is that we are being completely pulled apart—to an unprecedented extent—by all the things that we feel the need to be for so many different people, in so many different circumstances. This fragmentation is counter to our longing for wholeness and authenticity. Moreover, our bodies are still wired as if we were living in atavistic times. Unfortunately that means biologically they have difficulty distinguishing between minor hassles and life threats. We are flooded with cortisol as if we are facing all types of dire threats to our survival, though they are in fact a steady stream of trivial stressors such as traffic or being late to an appointment.
By embracing an existential humanistic perspective we can begin to gain a deeper sense of how we can nourish ourselves through relationships and connection more effectively. There is an invitation here to look honestly at our insecurities, facing adverse circumstances with directness and courage, to spend more time experiencing the beauty of the natural world in order to re-establish a sense of our place in it, and to have difficult conversations with those we love rather than constantly avoiding our fear of loss, abandonment, and isolation.
Confronting the existential vacuum
This struggle is one we have encountered in every age, from the Industrial Revolution onward, maybe even before. However, as society becomes more complex and technology evolves to make our lives more convenient, we continue to be pulled apart more and more.
So where do we get to be that whole person? Where do we get to call “home” in a psycho-spiritual sense? It is no wonder that many of us seem to have a sense of spiritual homesickness. Where do we get to be utterly free and completely ourselves without judgment or pressure to be something we are not? We long for a place that we do not feel like we can only express certain parts of who we are, in certain ways, at certain times.
If we think about the evolution of our humanity in the terms of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, many of us try to meet the esteem need—the need for respect, self-esteem, and confidence—through work.
The consequence of our obsession with work as an avenue toward esteem is that many of us have difficulty understanding who we are apart from what we do; therefore our selfhood is invested in activity. Unemployment is devastating, because it is as if our selfhood has been ripped out. This, of course, is really an invitation to confront the existential vacuum—the fear that ultimately there is nothing there and everything is meaningless. It can be an opportunity for what Maslow calls self-actualization, which empowers us to validate and value ourselves apart from what we do and from the recognition and esteem of peers. At that point, our relationships with cherished others becomes about mutually sharing the gifts of who we are with each other, not clinging through mutual neediness.
Embracing connection
Clearly, connection is very important in our longing to be whole. And while technology has empowered greater connection, it has also seemed to distort our authenticity. I think of the way we tailor ourselves for social media to come across much differently than the reality of our lives. There’s something tragic, bittersweet, and poignantly human in all of that.
If we want technology to work toward our humanity, we need to find ways of enhancing what the philosopher Martin Buber calls the “I thou” connection. In an “I thou” moment, we know each other as full human beings and have an empathic understanding of each other; we have genuine investment in who the other is.
These moments are fleeting because we cannot sustain that kind of intimacy for long. Therefore, we spend most of our time in “I it” interactions, which is where we relate to each other through our roles in life. For example, at the grocery store we may relate to others as customer and cashier; at the bank as client and bank teller; or in the classroom as student and professor. But sometimes, when those boundaries break down enough to allow for that deeper connection, even those interactions can become rich “I thou” moments of shared humanity.
There is a question here about the role that advancements in technology—like virtual reality—can play in enabling us to make this “I thou” connection from a distance, when we are not in each other’s physical presence. Can we achieve soul connection at a distance? Or does it simply construct an illusion of I-Thou, further contributing to fragmentation? Will technology be our undoing or our salvation, addressing ravages of climate change and bringing us together to solve the global issues that we face while offering humanity the opportunity for deeper connection?
While there are no clear answers, perhaps our ability to face these paradoxes with integrity is an invitation from the deepest part of our longing—our existential imperative to live fully out of our best potentials.
Continued evolution
Tragically, there are many people and groups of people who do not ever encounter any opportunity to benefit from the growth-promoting benefits of healthy relationships and connection to achieve wholeness or any approximation of self-actualization.
When large numbers of us are invisible due to homelessness or marginalization imposed by a privileged few (based on race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, ability, or religion/spirituality); the collective fullness and richness of the experience of shared humanity in the 21st century will elude us. In a very real sense, none of us can be fully authentic and whole while others are not; none of us are truly free unless all of us can be.
This outer fragmentation will be mirrored inside of us, and vice-versa. Working on ourselves necessarily requires work in the world, within the scope of our ability, and our construction of the world we live in together springs organically from our inner being. As Carl Rogers said, “The degree to which I can create relationships, which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons, is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself.”
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Giving Fieldwork a New Meaning
Some Saybrook students must complete clinical practicums or internships in offices and private practices to graduate. In this master’s in leadership program, they meet in the great outdoors.
In a time when everything seems to have gone digital, Saybrook is embarking on a new horizon: experiential outdoor education.
NOLS, the leader in wilderness education, and Saybrook University have partnered to provide an innovative M.A. in Leadership program that integrates online study with three wilderness expeditions and residential conferences. Classes started in fall 2018 with the first expedition taking place in October, a canoeing trip in Vernal, Utah. In March, students completed a canyoneering expedition.
“It’s an experiential degree,” says Zachary Taylor, a Saybrook student who is a part of the program. “We choose to go on these expeditions where we need to manage real risk, and in the moments where we have to make decisions that have real consequences, we learn a lot about ourselves. That’s invaluable and something that transfers back to the real world.”
The kind of coursework that Saybrook students complete in this program is certainly unconventional. The expedition components of the NOLS Saybrook M.A. in Leadership empower students to make decisions that have real-life consequences. Through this practical experience, students learn crucial communication and decision making skills in order to become resilient leaders in their future careers.
“That’s why I wanted to be in this program,” Taylor says. “We’re learning how to increase our tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. I’m really invested and I’m excited to see what the program becomes in the future.”
Remember
a hopeful future Saybrook student shares her inquisitive mind with the Saybrook University thought community
Enjoy the moment in this form,
but everything, when you’re reborn.
Traveled so far, ready to return,
matter no longer your concern.
You are eternity, limitless, vast,
no future, boundaries, or past.
Loving all throughout your stay,
to find this truth, will light your way.
Should doubts and fear arise in you,
invite the dreams and walk into…
the all and nothing, we are in each…
other, and everything within our reach.
Artist’s statement: This poem is a spiritual and a beautiful reminder that we all are connected, limitless, and immortal. I hope that this poem can make people realize that we have the ability to be one with each other and to be spiritual in the moment to moment reality as well as in our dreams.