“What price happiness?” I asked my patient innocently. He had come to see me, a licensed psychologist, in the early 1990s for complaints of depression, anxiety, marital problems and utter exhaustion. I should have known better, but I was still mildly surprised when he articulated a figure in dollars without hesitation. “Three million in the bank,” he said.
He had been suffering from severe depression, working himself to the bone, 16 hours a day, and only sleeping about four hours a night. The rest of the time he spent tossing and turning in bed, as he lay wide awake ruminating about all the catastrophic scenarios that might befall him if he did not earn enough money to guarantee his comfort. He had been a reserve basketball player on a professional US basketball team, a team that had gone to the NBA Finals several times, and had earned a substantial salary that for many people, would represent a lottery dream of lifetime earnings and beyond. Yet, for this patient, it was not enough to give him an iron clad guarantee of security. Financial security, in his estimation, was equated with contentment and happiness. Yet, it remained ever elusive.
Like many patients I have seen over the years, he remained locked into this self-defeating and fruitless vicious cycle, telling himself that he was not secure enough, yet eroding the very life that meant so much, desperately scrambling for the mirage of security in the oasis of financial comfort.
Flash backward approximately a dozen years to 1981, when a book had been published, The Final Epidemic, edited by Ruth Adams and Susan Cullen, and published by the by the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, in cooperation with the Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Council for a Livable World Education Fund, with contributions from scientists and physicians across both sides of the Cold War divide. It starkly warned of the consequences of nuclear proliferation at a time when the nuclear clock was just milliseconds away from Doomsday Midnight. Those who recognized it, realized that we had once again come within a hairbreadth of planetary self-destruction, the last time being the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was less than 20 years prior, but it seemed like eons ago. With the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union, represented symbolically by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the melting of the Cold War, we told ourselves that we had once again escaped a final destiny—the end of our Planet Earth and all living things that inhabit it.
The crisis and Final Day of Reckoning had faded away, like a lifting fog before a new dawn, revealing a day of shimmering beauty on Earth, to be cherished and embraced to the max. Yet, one thing seemed to escape our consciousness. We were only less than 20 years removed from the previous brush with self-inflicted annihilation, which stood in stark contrast to millions, indeed billions of years of proliferation on Earth!
What next? How long can we keep playing this fatal game of Russian roulette with our earthly resources, thinking that we are “safe” if only we have a certain amount of money in the bank, or enough gasoline to fill our auto tanks, or resources to fuel our insatiable addiction to creature comforts and what we casually refer to as our “needs” to maintain our “lifestyle,” or ______ (you can fill in the blank yourself)?
Flash forward to September 2001. It was the week after America was attacked on her home soil by terrorists, and our Age of Innocence suddenly, and dramatically, came smashing down in a bloody inferno of human and manmade destruction. The world as we know it in America, as we had innocently believed it to be, suddenly was revealed before us to be something shockingly and dreadfully different. Suddenly, the illusion of homeland security was revealed, and we had gotten a bitter taste of what it is like to live in many other parts of the world, in which people live with the knowledge that amassing possessions, land, technological gadgets, and just about any other tangible things one can think of, does not guarantee safety or happiness.
I recall seeing a patient about a week after the 9/11 attack, a man who arguably had everything going for him in terms of accumulated wealth, privilege, and position in his community. He had sought help from me in the hopes of relief from a chronic habit of skin picking that resulted in large patches of self-inflicted wounds on his legs and arms, which he covered with long sleeve shirts and long pants, even in the miserable heat of summer time.
Despite his wealth and privilege, he was a lost soul, and a slave to his unremitting habit of picking and skin infections. I recall that he arrived for his appointment a week or so after the 9/11 attacks, appearing sheepishly guilty. The first words out of his mouth, words that we have all uttered after being cruelly reoriented to the harsh reality that conflicts with our positive fantasies about invulnerability, were, “After these horrible attacks, I feel so small and humiliated for talking about my trivial complaints.”
This innocent moment of self-reflection and perspective taking, of course, lasted only briefly. Like all of us, my patient somehow worked through his momentary guilt, and as our lives returned to some sense of semi-normality, albeit with the tacit recognition that things would never really be the same, and he resumed talking about his worries that somehow he would not have a comfortable future, all the while digging into his flesh with renewed desperation.
I could go on and on with countless other stories of people with whom I have shared time and emotional space in my professional role as a clinical psychologist and therapist, as well as a professor and teacher. I also have no illusions that I am exempt from these very human weaknesses. After all, we all crave predictability and safety, despite the cold facts as we know them: since our magnificent inventions over the past 100 plus years, coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, we have made incredible “advances” that have simultaneously allowed us to have previously unimagined freedoms and pleasures and technological miracles that have prayed us to master our earthly and heavenly domains, yet at the heavy price of human enslavement, both personal and societal, and suicidal environmental despoliation. But these self-inflicted wounds to Mother Earth and all her inhabitants have unfolded, indeed have been created, in the blink of an historic eye! Since the very first atomic bomb was developed and detonated, we have marched headlong on a path of environmental destruction and ever increasing threat of nuclear suicide that is not thousands of years in the making, but mere decades. It is quite simply, unsustainable. Something must give.
As a mental health professional, one of the core competencies that we value and teach is that of the importance of self-reflection. When engaging in self-reflection, one must take perspective, putting ego inside, and with all humility, take stock of oneself and one’s surroundings, incorporating discordant input, with the understanding that in doing so, it makes us wiser and more objective beings. In my mind, the ability to step back, take stock, gather perspective, put one’s ego on the shelf, and with all due humility, affect our destiny in a sustainable manner that not only preserves and cherishes the incredible gifts that we have been given on this Earth, but also makes it a more sustainable and just home for all people and living things, not just the privileged few. The problem is, we are running out of time. The very next crisis that we encounter may not give us the luxury to pause and ask, “What could we have done differently?”
I am a hopeful and generally positive person who stubbornly engages in problem-solving, not self-denigration or blissful denial. But the fact remains that it was only 35 years ago that I was prompted to consider these issues head-on, having read The Final Epidemic when it was first published. The clock is still ticking. Is anyone listening?
Bruce S. Zahn, Ed.D., ABPP, joined the core faculty in the Psychology Department at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in July 1999, and serves as Professor and Director of Clinical Training in the PsyD in Clinical Psychology program. Dr. Zahn is a licensed and Board Certified psychologist who has a broad variety of clinical experiences with patient populations ranging from children to older adults.
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What price happiness?
Posted on September 15, 2016 by Dr. Bruce Zahn
“What price happiness?” I asked my patient innocently. He had come to see me, a licensed psychologist, in the early 1990s for complaints of depression, anxiety, marital problems and utter exhaustion. I should have known better, but I was still mildly surprised when he articulated a figure in dollars without hesitation. “Three million in the bank,” he said.
He had been suffering from severe depression, working himself to the bone, 16 hours a day, and only sleeping about four hours a night. The rest of the time he spent tossing and turning in bed, as he lay wide awake ruminating about all the catastrophic scenarios that might befall him if he did not earn enough money to guarantee his comfort. He had been a reserve basketball player on a professional US basketball team, a team that had gone to the NBA Finals several times, and had earned a substantial salary that for many people, would represent a lottery dream of lifetime earnings and beyond. Yet, for this patient, it was not enough to give him an iron clad guarantee of security. Financial security, in his estimation, was equated with contentment and happiness. Yet, it remained ever elusive.
Like many patients I have seen over the years, he remained locked into this self-defeating and fruitless vicious cycle, telling himself that he was not secure enough, yet eroding the very life that meant so much, desperately scrambling for the mirage of security in the oasis of financial comfort.
Flash backward approximately a dozen years to 1981, when a book had been published, The Final Epidemic, edited by Ruth Adams and Susan Cullen, and published by the by the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, in cooperation with the Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Council for a Livable World Education Fund, with contributions from scientists and physicians across both sides of the Cold War divide. It starkly warned of the consequences of nuclear proliferation at a time when the nuclear clock was just milliseconds away from Doomsday Midnight. Those who recognized it, realized that we had once again come within a hairbreadth of planetary self-destruction, the last time being the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was less than 20 years prior, but it seemed like eons ago. With the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union, represented symbolically by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the melting of the Cold War, we told ourselves that we had once again escaped a final destiny—the end of our Planet Earth and all living things that inhabit it.
The crisis and Final Day of Reckoning had faded away, like a lifting fog before a new dawn, revealing a day of shimmering beauty on Earth, to be cherished and embraced to the max. Yet, one thing seemed to escape our consciousness. We were only less than 20 years removed from the previous brush with self-inflicted annihilation, which stood in stark contrast to millions, indeed billions of years of proliferation on Earth!
What next? How long can we keep playing this fatal game of Russian roulette with our earthly resources, thinking that we are “safe” if only we have a certain amount of money in the bank, or enough gasoline to fill our auto tanks, or resources to fuel our insatiable addiction to creature comforts and what we casually refer to as our “needs” to maintain our “lifestyle,” or ______ (you can fill in the blank yourself)?
Flash forward to September 2001. It was the week after America was attacked on her home soil by terrorists, and our Age of Innocence suddenly, and dramatically, came smashing down in a bloody inferno of human and manmade destruction. The world as we know it in America, as we had innocently believed it to be, suddenly was revealed before us to be something shockingly and dreadfully different. Suddenly, the illusion of homeland security was revealed, and we had gotten a bitter taste of what it is like to live in many other parts of the world, in which people live with the knowledge that amassing possessions, land, technological gadgets, and just about any other tangible things one can think of, does not guarantee safety or happiness.
I recall seeing a patient about a week after the 9/11 attack, a man who arguably had everything going for him in terms of accumulated wealth, privilege, and position in his community. He had sought help from me in the hopes of relief from a chronic habit of skin picking that resulted in large patches of self-inflicted wounds on his legs and arms, which he covered with long sleeve shirts and long pants, even in the miserable heat of summer time.
Despite his wealth and privilege, he was a lost soul, and a slave to his unremitting habit of picking and skin infections. I recall that he arrived for his appointment a week or so after the 9/11 attacks, appearing sheepishly guilty. The first words out of his mouth, words that we have all uttered after being cruelly reoriented to the harsh reality that conflicts with our positive fantasies about invulnerability, were, “After these horrible attacks, I feel so small and humiliated for talking about my trivial complaints.”
This innocent moment of self-reflection and perspective taking, of course, lasted only briefly. Like all of us, my patient somehow worked through his momentary guilt, and as our lives returned to some sense of semi-normality, albeit with the tacit recognition that things would never really be the same, and he resumed talking about his worries that somehow he would not have a comfortable future, all the while digging into his flesh with renewed desperation.
I could go on and on with countless other stories of people with whom I have shared time and emotional space in my professional role as a clinical psychologist and therapist, as well as a professor and teacher. I also have no illusions that I am exempt from these very human weaknesses. After all, we all crave predictability and safety, despite the cold facts as we know them: since our magnificent inventions over the past 100 plus years, coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, we have made incredible “advances” that have simultaneously allowed us to have previously unimagined freedoms and pleasures and technological miracles that have prayed us to master our earthly and heavenly domains, yet at the heavy price of human enslavement, both personal and societal, and suicidal environmental despoliation. But these self-inflicted wounds to Mother Earth and all her inhabitants have unfolded, indeed have been created, in the blink of an historic eye! Since the very first atomic bomb was developed and detonated, we have marched headlong on a path of environmental destruction and ever increasing threat of nuclear suicide that is not thousands of years in the making, but mere decades. It is quite simply, unsustainable. Something must give.
As a mental health professional, one of the core competencies that we value and teach is that of the importance of self-reflection. When engaging in self-reflection, one must take perspective, putting ego inside, and with all humility, take stock of oneself and one’s surroundings, incorporating discordant input, with the understanding that in doing so, it makes us wiser and more objective beings. In my mind, the ability to step back, take stock, gather perspective, put one’s ego on the shelf, and with all due humility, affect our destiny in a sustainable manner that not only preserves and cherishes the incredible gifts that we have been given on this Earth, but also makes it a more sustainable and just home for all people and living things, not just the privileged few. The problem is, we are running out of time. The very next crisis that we encounter may not give us the luxury to pause and ask, “What could we have done differently?”
I am a hopeful and generally positive person who stubbornly engages in problem-solving, not self-denigration or blissful denial. But the fact remains that it was only 35 years ago that I was prompted to consider these issues head-on, having read The Final Epidemic when it was first published. The clock is still ticking. Is anyone listening?
Bruce S. Zahn, Ed.D., ABPP, joined the core faculty in the Psychology Department at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in July 1999, and serves as Professor and Director of Clinical Training in the PsyD in Clinical Psychology program. Dr. Zahn is a licensed and Board Certified psychologist who has a broad variety of clinical experiences with patient populations ranging from children to older adults.