Why did you kill these people? Because nobody stopped me. The Good Nurse - The movie

 Do police detectives sometimes do good work and save lives by getting to the bottom of criminal activity in spite of obstacles and deliberate attempts to cover up wrong doing? Yes.

Are there good people who struggle with personal hardships to do the right thing? Yes.

There are many lessons that viewers of The Good Nurse, a movie on Netflix, can take away from this movie based on real life events where a nurse killed as many as 400 patients in 9 or more hospitals.

Rather than investigate Charles Cullen's murderous behavior, hospital after hospital, minimizing their risk exposure to liability for their employee's engagement in activities that led to patient's deaths while under their care, these hospitals just quietly terminated nurse Cullen's employment and he moving on to continue the activity in another hospital.

At the end of the movie when nurse Cullen is asked why he killed these patients he simply says, "because nobody stopped me."

Should you change your mind?

 

Reactive or responsive?

 

The idea of being responsive and not reactive is a common topic in my counseling sessions.

Sad or mad about climate change?

Last year The Lancet, one of the oldest and most-respected general medical journals, published a study of ten thousand young people, ages sixteen to twenty-five, in ten countries, that revealed that the majority of the respondents experienced climate anxiety as a regular part of their lives. The study concluded: “Distress about climate change is associated with young people perceiving that they have no future, that humanity is doomed, and that governments are failing to respond adequately, and with feelings of betrayal and abandonment by governments and adults. Climate change and government inaction are chronic stressors that could have considerable, long-lasting, and incremental negative implications for the mental health of children and young people.”

WHEN I ASKED HADLEY if thinking about the climate crisis left her feeling sad, she said no.

“The sadness doesn’t come through as much anymore as the anger does. I can’t mope. Or, I mean, I try not to mope. The main emotion I feel is anger at the people who did this. There are people who could fix this, people with money and power, people who could start to solve this, and they’re not. And that is what makes me mad.”

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Dogs or cats?

 A 55 year old male client last week asked me if I would write a letter to the apartment manager of the complex he is moving into declaring that his cat is a "support animal". He said he has had this cat for 4 years.

I have always thought of cats being more of a female thing and dogs more of a male thing, but I am not sure I am right. And then I wondered what is the most frequent support animal: a dog or cat and why. I have no idea and for a mental health professional supposedly having some expertise in "support animals" you might think that I would know.

At any rate here is what I have found out so far.

In my family of origin and family of intention we always had both a dog and cat and sometimes, fish, hamsters, rabbits. No amphibians or reptiles and least for not more than a few days. Turtles though. We sometimes had turtles but then the salmonella thing put us off of them.

There is no information about the sex of the owner.

I did write the letter for him.

"Gaslighting" is the word of the year.

 "Gaslighting" is the word of the year for 2022 according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Gaslighting is when you question the veracity of other people's statements and they twist things around and have you believing that you're the one who is mistaken or crazy. It is a way of disqualifying and dismissing a search for truth and meaning.

Gaslighting as become a prominent strategy in politics in the last 10 years and in the cable news shows. On the internet it used to be called "flaming" when one person attempts to discredit another with ad hominem attacks.

For more click here.

Generational cohorts and the differentiation of self

The idea of the socializing and conditioning of children which occurs facilitated by the culture the child grows up in, of which parents are only one factor among many, is significant in understanding human development.

Sociologically there are certain values, technologies, and political events which define generational cohorts. The popular names we have for these cohorts: boomers, gen x, millennials, gen z is shorthand for the culture that shaped these various cohorts. As a boomer therapist I am very aware of these differences as they shape the cognitive, value, and social filters through which a client may likely view and interpret the world. Being aware of these filters is the first skill of 21 which Cindy Wigglesworth names in her book on spiritual intelligence. The question that Wigglesworth asks to focus on this skill is "Do you think you can explain to others the impacts of your culture, your upbringing, and your mental assumptions on how you interpret the world around you?" The stage of skill development is low, medium, or high.

Being born in 1965 a person's birth occurred right at the end of the boomer generation and the beginning of the gen x. Gen x was the self esteem generation when there were prizes for everyone. You got a trophy just for participating rather than for any merit. Gen x was also the generation which saw the introduction of cell phones and the internet and was the generation raised by parents heavily influenced by the war in Vietnam and the Civil rights era with the assassination of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcom X, Bobby Kennedy. Gen X also experienced  the introduction of managed health care and the explosive growth of publicly funded colleges, both four year and two year community colleges. Gen x also saw the introduction of birth control, the legalization of abortion and the liberation of females in western societies.

One of the questions always in the back of my mind when I interact with people is "To what extent do you know what makes you tick?" This is the first skill in spiritual intelligence and is at a very low level in our society. Most people, 80%, are annoyed with this question and become defensive. This phenomenon is not related to chronological age but to the level of spiritual intelligence the person has achieved in their life.

Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. How many people do you find that live examined lives? Is living an examined life something which our society in general values and supports? It is something that we psychotherapists, hopefully, nurture and facilitate as it contributes to intrinsic rewards of true self esteem and self confidence and what Murray Bowen called "differentiation of self.".