Lifelong Learning

There was a phrase I heard constantly throughout my childhood. In the Bronx accent I usually heard it, it sounded like this: “You live and you loyn.” Translation: You live and you learn. It was most often uttered as a way of comforting someone when something happened that wasn’t quite right, kind of like, well, you won’t make that mistake again and it will be alright.

But, as is typical with phrases that hang around for a lifetime, there was a lot more to it than that. Do we, in fact, “live and learn”?

In “The Once and Future King,” T.H. White writes (through the character of Merlyn):

The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins,… you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.

For many of us, the product of our education system in the U.S. is to see learning as a chore. It is something we have to do to go from here to there, like an uncomfortable bus ride over pot-holed streets. But in Merlyn’s comforting words learning takes a different form. It is a kind of therapy, a comfort and a solace. It is to some degree a place away from the hectic world of business and rumor, but it is also a powerful tool with which to engage life. Perhaps most importantly it is an antidote to “fear and distrust.” Learning, the pursuit of the truth, guided by a moral compass, leads to compassionate understanding and is a powerful weapon against those “evil lunatics” who, in reality, fail to understand or see the deeper truths.

Great Faith

I am and have always have been fear-based. Among the long list of my weaknesses, this is perhaps at the top. I lose sleep as a result of fear, it drives my anxiety, and it is the sweetest nectar for the demons that get between me and that elusive state of inner calm. It is my constant, unrelenting companion, and it gnaws at my soul.

Traditional psychological wisdom holds that the antidote to fear is courage. Courage is holding the fear as your guidepost while you take action toward resolving the thing that is feared. While courage is certainly the most direct medicine, it is often difficult for me to find it on the shelf. There is another antidote that I have been trying to ingest that some suggest might work just as well. That antidote is faith.

In the Zen Buddhist tradition it is often held that there are three elements needed to make spiritual progress: great faith, great doubt and great perseverance. In the world of autism treatment, we face the deep need for all of these. We need faith to overcome the fears that surround us: the fear that our children won’t learn to speak or have friends, that our interventions won’t work, that we won’t be as good as we can be, that we won’t be able to get that report done on time, that our supervisors or the parents with whom we work won’t like us, that the economy will threaten our jobs, and on and on.

Many religious folks will tell you that the problem with the word “faith” is that it is a noun. As such, it is something you either have or don’t have; it is something you can somehow possess. This is problematic because faith is really something you do, not something you have. (Arguably it should be a verb; harden the “th” sound as in “tithe” and pronounce it as though it were spelled “fathe.”) One does not “have faith” but instead one actively “fathes”. To fathe is to actively believe that one can do or accomplish or have or be or overcome the thing that is feared. Whatever obstacles fear engenders “faithing” can overcome.

Faith often teases truth to the point where those who are strongly wedded to truth and its kissing cousin reality become dismissive. When I feel most troubled, I cannot bring myself to believe things that I wished were true but that I have no evidence to believe are in fact true. I can, however, make “soft plans” coupled with the belief that somehow, either operating within or outside of the box, I can get to the other side of whatever I fear.

Parents of children with autism “fathe” their way into seeing their children as gifts, celebrating each small victory of learning along the way. PCFA staff “fathe” their way into finishing their reports, confronting their supervisors, trying new interventions, facing crowded freeways, and instilling confidence in their supervisees.

Faith, I believe, must become as natural as the breath. If absent, it requires intention to revive it, but it should become our constant companion in order to combat the fears that plague us. So when the fear rises up within us, we “breathe” the belief that we can do the thing that is feared, and this faith transforms the energy used by fear to the energy required to take action.

It is always this brief suspension of “realistic” thinking that allows us to take the leap to become just a little more than we are. It allows us to have the courage to love better, to confront those who hurt us, to receive love and the other gifts those in our lives try to give us, and to see the world as filled with potential and awe. Faith is a true antidote to fear; it can still the demons inside us and guide us toward a sense of peace.

The Art of Science

In younger days, whenever a group of pretentious young adults got together for a gathering, it wasn’t long before someone brought up the question: “What is art?” The idea was to try to say something intelligent without sounding too silly, nearly always an impossible task. Eventually someone would say something about art similar to what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography: that he couldn’t quite explain it, but “I know it when I see it.”
I have taught now for several years at UCLA School of Medicine. Initially the course I tutored was in the first year of medical school, and occasionally I would ask the students whether they thought medicine was a science or an art. Typically in the first year nearly all the students said it was a science. In the second year, however, the students were split more evenly down the middle. I have often wondered where the numbers would be by the fourth year. Real life, I suppose, can transform that which appears at first to follow the linear rules of scientific inquiry into the more mystical realm of art.
It has been said that good art awakens something in us, and becomes the abode of that which we might call “spirit.” Defining “spirit” of course is another party topic, one more likely to be heard these days than the question of defining art. For the moment, let us agree that spirit refers to some sort of essential life-force. It is that force that animates us, drives us to feel alive.
Behavior analysts are trained to believe that a defining characteristic of their profession is that it is a science. It follows logical rules, and decisions are based on data, not intuition or guesswork. The former of course are the domain of science, where the latter tends to reside in the realm of spirit. But I would suggest the opposite: watch a behaviorist at work. The truly good ones are artists. Their work awakens something inside of us, makes us feel alive. Their interactions are like impromptu dances, reacting gracefully and seamlessly to the client’s behavior. The behavior analyst as artist spontaneously creates something beyond the logic of science as she taps into her repertoire and responds with a deep awareness of the child’s needs, wishes, intentions and the environment within which the child interacts. As it is with most art, these results take years of study, years of “science”, years of clumsy, “bad art” to build on.
As the whole is always more than the sum of its parts, the behavior analyst creates something beyond the mere piecing together of the data. She uses those tools as a painter might learn how to mix colors, or which paints or brushes creates a desired effect. But the end result is the creation of something larger than the technical methods could do on their own. A child’s spontaneous smile, a laugh at just the right moment, the uttering of the first meaningful words, the twinkling in a child’s eyes as he discovers something new is an awakening of the child’s spirit. It is an awakening that comes often as the partial result of the creative efforts of the behavior analyst, the artistry and dedication, the creative and yes, even intuitive, dance between the spirit of the behavior analyst and the spirit of the client.

Invisible Rubrics

I have always loved my work, and have said that if ever the negatives outweigh the positives then it is time to reconsider my work life. At a recent supervisor meeting, I asked our supervisors for suggestions on how to make their lives at Pacific Child less burdensome. I wanted to know what they loved about their jobs and what they wanted to see different. Of course it was nice to hear about the positives, but I was concerned that people weren’t feeling safe to talk about the negatives. One supervisor used a phrase that I loved. She stated that she was afraid of the “invisible rubric,” and what I believe she meant was that she didn’t know exactly how she was being evaluated, and therefore carried around a lot of anxiety that what she was doing wasn’t what we, her supervisors, were evaluating her on.
It is always the unknown that frightens us the most, the monster hiding in the closet. And perhaps that is the greatest source of pain that the parents of our children with autism feel as well. The word “autism” originally meant “self-focused,” and focusing on oneself also meant shutting out the rest of the world. But if we truly believed there was no one hiding beneath the cloak of silent withdrawal we wouldn’t care much. It is that view, that there is someone hiding in the closet of our child’s mind that is so taunting. Who is this child? What is he thinking? What does he want? And what does he think of us?
In a strikingly parallel way, it is our children with autism who we believe lack the ability to determine (or even care) how others think of them (“theory of mind”). Our supervisors and staff work diligently to plant and nurture within our children the seeds of knowing and caring how others think about them, yet our supervisors themselves struggle to know what it is that they are being evaluated on, what it is that their supervisors think about them.
We are all evaluated by others, especially by those with whom we are close, continually. “Unconditional positive regard” was the watchword of the sixties, and it was as mythical as unicorns. So we struggle to know what it is that others expect of us so that we can choose freely whether or not we wish to jump through those hoops. But it is those invisible hoops that are the toughest, especially when the hoops are on fire.
So it behooves us all to make the invisible rubrics visible. But that is also a two-way street. When in doubt, ask those for whom we care what they want and expect from us, and let’s not be shy about making the deal go in both directions. Even those doing the supervision wonder and worry about how their supervisees are viewing them. Let us strive toward making our expectations clear, and let’s talk about it often and openly.