ookpik turned me on to the fact that my nation's military was giving away free therapist CEUs.CEUs: mental health professionals all have to do "continuing education" (CE) as part of the terms of our licenses to practice. This means taking CE courses and trainings, and usually having to pay money for the privilege.
Apparently the Dept of Defense and the Veterans Health Administration are sufficiently concerned about the dearth of mental health professionals culturally competent to treat service members and veterans, that they were willing to chip in to develop an online self-study training course in the topic, and give it away to any professional who cares to take it.
(Well, I don't know any professional: maybe some of my Canadian colleagues want to give it a try? I don't know if they let in people from non-US IP numbers.... but I don't know that they don't, so.
Also, they welcome all healthcare providers, though they explicitly state the primary audience is therapists.)
Including me, who I think technically cannot be hired by the VA, because my grad school isn't CACREP accredited (we don't usually do CACREP in MA), and possibly is similarly disqualified from Tricare. And, then there's the bit where I have no intention of ever working for Los Federales again, and have no particular intention of or yen for working with veterans.
But, hey! Two of my favorite phrases are "free CEUs" and "cultural competency", so I'm totally in.
"Cultural competency" is a term of art in all the human services fields, but in none is it so core an issue as in psychotherapy. It's a big idea that encompasses many thing, but for now, let's summarize it as the recognition of the fact that humans can only make meaning of behaviors, including words, in contexts, and the contexts in which we make meaning are cultures, and, consequently, attempting to make sense of behaviors, including words, without having the right cultural decoder ring, gives nonsense results that are potentially very dangerous to one's patients.
As I understand it, it first arose out of anti-racism work in the heyday of the Civil Rights movement. Consider: if a patient presents with chronic preoccupying anxiety about the police being out to get them, is that paranoia? White therapists oblivious of racialized policing tended to say yes even when the patient was a young black man, out of their obliviousness for the lived experience of actual young black men of police doing the sort of things which white people are only now finding out about. Psychotherapy, as a profession, had a really unfortunate problem with therapists taking their own personal experience for "normal" and projecting their own cultures on patients, and interpreting their behaviors through them, and doing serious damage. Cultural competency is a paradigm of the antidote: knowing enough about a culture to be able to correctly interpret the information you get from your patient.
This has immediate and obvious relevance to the case of any patient from any minority-experience or marginalized-experience demographic: racial and ethic minorities, GLBT, the disabled, women (!), religious minorities, e.g. Now, cultural competency is not just for peoples who have been discriminated against or disenfranchised. The movement for cultural competency is a recognition that all peoples have cultures – plural, because no person has only one culture – and all people need to be understood in their cultural context(s) if they're going to be understood at all. But, of course, that issue becomes particularly acute when the patient belongs to a culture against which there are strong prejudices.
Like, you know, military service members.
Yeah. You wouldn't maybe think it, if you weren't a member of that culture, and, heck, maybe not even if you were. But the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration are confronting the fact that they need to provide their charges with mental health care, but therapists, as a population, apparently show high levels of prejudice against people who serve in the armed forces, and even where not prejudiced, hold many stereotypes of and ignorant ideas about service members, compliments of mass media.
It's exactly the same problem as, e.g. gay and lesbian people had in the 1950s-1970s with rampant homophobia among therapists.
Yes. I am being treated to the astonishing spectacle of the Federal government – of the United States of America, yes! – taking the position of an oppressed minority, and pleading for tolerance and understanding.
And they're not wrong! They're actually precisely and perfectly correct, and the fact they've realized that the concept of "cultural competency" applies to service members and veterans, too, is appropriate, amazing, and actually kind of wonderful. In addition to being exactly what the problem needs, and likely to be enormously helpful for service members seeking care, it also helps advance the movement for cultural competency in general. This is a win-win all around.
So that's all well and good.
Completely aside from the explicit, intended content of the course, the course itself, being a product of exactly that culture, also demonstrates that culture. It illustrates:
• What things the culture thinks are important for outsiders to know about the culture
• How the culture talks about those things, from terminology to pacing to affect (there were lots of videos of actual service members actually talking about things) to rhetorical norms
• How the culture thinks outsiders see it
• Various cultural values and assumptions
This was absolutely fascinating.
Here's a random little example. In the introductory materials, they explained that there'd be videos of actual service members talking about their experiences, and that these were not actors. So (the narrator apologized) "they might not always be the most articulate". I, of course, turned up my computer's speakers and tuned my attention to a laser-like focus.
All of the videos were perfectly comprehensible. With no effort. A few grammatical errors here and there, one black serviceman into whose speech a few AAVEisms slipped, that was it.
Now, in absence of knowing more of the cultural context, we can only hypothesize. Here are mine:
0) There are more videos which I haven't seen. I don't know if the other segments – I've only done one of four so far – have videos of less articulate speech; I don't know if the intro material pertained to the segment I did or the whole thing.
1) They wrote the body text in reference to different, earlier, inferior videos, that have subsequently been replaced by those of more well-spoken service members.
2) They wrote the body text before they had the videos, and the boffins who made the website content assumed the jarheads who would be interviewed would sound like idiots, i.e. intra-service prejudice.
3) The service has such extraordinarily high standards for speech, that it feels the occasional laspe in noun-verb number agreement due to the speaker shifting the topic of his sentence in the middle on further thought is a stain on the honor of the entire enterprise.
4) The military is one of those cultures where you apologize as a social form that has nothing to do with relational rift-repair, but maybe signifies an acknowledgement of a superior's status, a la, "I'm so sorry I have nothing to serve you but this seven course meal, I hope you will be able to tolerate such humble rations".
5) There is a defensiveness – an assumption of disapproval and hostility married to a sense of unworthiness and guilt – here, causing an apology for something that doesn't need apologizing for. Like when a host starts apologizing to her guests that her spotless house isn't fit for habitation. (Differs from #4 in that #4 is just a thing you say to be polite, while this the speaker actually neurotically believes.)
Applying what was explicitly taught by the course, they would seem to want me to go with hypothesis #3, high standards: they certainly talked quite a bit about "competence" and "excellence" as military values. Hypothesis #2, intra-service prejudice, is actually something you can get reading between the lines of the course content, which discussed different branches of the military having their own subcultures, and different units and functions also having subcultures.
The hypothesis for which, at this point, I have the most evidence, is, alas, #5, emotional insecurity: this was not the only such example which was suggestive of deeply internalized shame – the kind we call "toxic shame".
Now, I'll be the first to point out, being a novice at military culture, I'm not in possession of the secret decoder ring here, and may be misconstruing the meaning of things. This is, however, supposedly an attempt to communicate with people in my subculture – therapists – in our own language, and I gotta say, by my cultural norms, there was this weird undertenor of guilt and shame and insecurity.
I say weird undertenor, because a certain defensiveness is something I'd expect, at least retroactively now that I've seen the video and done some perspective taking as per above about the prejudices service members face from many therapists. This is a document from one party to another that it expects hostility from. There might be over-explaining. There might be defiance. There might be – and there were – requests to check one's privilege and admonitions not to succumb to stereotypes and bigotry.
And there might be compulsive apologeticness and other forms of pre-emptive submission to divert condemnation, but, man, that is so not what I expected from the DoD.
Now, this may be a product very specifically of the people who made this. There's 10 of them: 3 PhDs, a PsyD, an MD, an RN+MSN, an MSW, an MEd, and a program manager and a project manager without credentials listed. They are all affiliated with the DoD or the Department of Veteran Affairs. In an important sense, this is largely a group of biculturual people: people who are culturally both therapists and military. I wonder if these people experience themselves as a stigmatized group among therapists. (That they see themselves as a stigmatized group among service members goes almost without question: they address the topic of hostility to mental health care on the part of service members explicitly, locating it in a culture that normalizes that hostility for various reasons both good and bad.) Or perhaps more importantly, do they internalize that stigma of being a therapist who belongs to the military culture?
In any event, there's all sorts of stuff going on between the lines.
The first part of the training was a "self-assessment", in which we were invited to reflect on prejudices and biased beliefs we might have about service members or the military or things we associate with them.
Like firearms.
Let me back up: the self-assessment piece is actually kind of standard for this sort of cultural competency training. By soliciting reflections on one's ideas about a people, one can then bring those prejudices and biases to light where they can be contradicted and corrected, or at least specifically addressed.
As a side note, I particularly appreciate how they elicited both negative stereotypes and positive ones ("soldiers are heroes") which, as any "model minority" can attest, can be just as problematic.
But here's a fascinating thing: through all this "self-assessment" exercise which involves considering "beliefs" "you might have" (I think is how they put it), I eventually noticed: what they're talking about is prejudices and stereotypes, but they never use those words. Instead they talk five sides around a square to get to the same upshot.
I wonder if that was a tactical decision or whether those are words that simply hadn't occurred to the makers. I can easily see it going either way. I think applying the ideas "stereotype" and "prejudice" to the class of "war fighters" (to use the term they did in the training) is a pretty novel, if not alien, one to most people. Definitely to the students, and possibly even to the therapists making this thing. The use of those terms to apply to negative sentiment (or idealized sentiment) towards war fighters might... go down hard, among their target audience.
On the other hand, maybe they should have just put it out there. Because while, for a bunch of reasons (more on which below), therapists as a population may stereotype war fighters and have prejudices about them, and not much like being called out for them... most therapists, I think – and I'm not saying it's an overwhelming majority, but I think it is a majority – have the moral commitment to oppose prejudice and stereotypes, and have the integrity to be pulled up short when the failing is point-blank pointed out to them. This is something really core to therapist professional values: it involves being both mean and ignorant about people, which are two things most therapists' egos are pretty invested in not being.
So while I think, if they did decide to side-step the issue to avoid getting therapists' hackles up, and slip the premise in sneaky-like to try to get therapists on board with the importance of non-oppressive attitudes towards service members without resistance... maybe they missed an opportunity. I think at least for many therapists, working through that reaction might have, despite the trouble, provided worthwhile longer-term gains.
Or maybe they tried that approach out and it didn't work. I dunno. I wasn't there when they made this thing.
Once I noticed that they were having this big discussion about prejudice and stereotyping that danced around the words "prejudice" and "stereotype", I became sensitized to other rhetorical holes – places were perfectly good words or concepts would logically go, but which are not used.
Which brings us back to the firearms thing.
As one might expect, the training did things like ask us to reflect on feelings and opinions we might have of people in the military as such, and, for instance, showed us lists of stereotypes and asked the student to consider how much they agreed with them. But then, after a bunch of discussion of service members, they specifically asked us to consider our attitudes about firearms and people who use them.
Now, this is kind of brilliant. My impression is that US therapists as a profession may represent the single most homogeneous population with regard to opinion about gun control: they're in favor of it. [Digression #1] Indeed, I get the impression that a lot of my colleagues (but not, mind you, a lot of my colleagues who hang out here) loathe firearms pretty deeply, and react to them as physical reifications of Pure Evil.
So certainly addressing therapists' sentiments around firearms and those who bear them is crucial in preparing therapists to work with service members.
But after my initial reaction of pleased approval, I got to thinking. I started noticing something that I eventually realized was a hole.
I started thinking about why it is that therapists, as a class, so often hate firearms. And, depending on which sort of Aristotelian Cause you're talking about, there's lots of different "whys". But on a crucial level, the answer to that question is: because guns are tools for violence, guns are tools for killing.
And more fundamentally, therapists, as a class, are really against violence, and particularly against killing.
Actually, I think it goes further than that. I get the impression that a sizable proportion of therapists have, above and beyond principled stances on violence, actual issues with violence.
And I've been slowly coming around to this point of view over the last almost six years I've worked in the field, during much of which time, I have worked with violent patients of various sorts, including criminal offenders. So, of course, I have occasion to talk to other MH professionals, whether other treaters (psychiatrists, social workers, substance abuse counselors, etc) working on the same cases with me or in the same (or same sorts of) program, or just, you know, when "So what sorts of patients do you see?" comes up at professional development events. And my patients talk to me about their experiences with previous and parallel treaters.
And the thing I'm getting from my patients is that one thing they prize about me is that I don't freak out or reject them or otherwise get weird when they talk about their experiences of being violent or having violent impulses and thoughts. Because I gather that is a thing that, unfortunately, happens with some therapists. And talking to fellow therapists, I notice a lot of them, when they talk about violence, seem to do so in ways that I think of as naive or ignorant, often with what we term in the biz as "a neurotic energy", suggesting strongly to me that violence is a thing they conceive of and experience as alien.
That would pose a pretty big obstacle for working with people who are violent for a living.
Like, say, war fighters.
The reason that therapists so often despise firearms is because therapists usually consider violence, especially killing, to be extremely morally wrong, and often find the idea of having to do anything with someone who is violent, or who has killed other people, extremely upsetting.
The word "violence" was not used once in this training. During the solicitation of possible "beliefs" the students might have about war fighters, "service members are violent people" and "service members kill people" did not appear.
That is, on retrospect, quite an amazing lacuna, in light of how therapists' issues with violence and people who use violence are the bedrock of the problem this program is attempting to redress.
Before proceeding I want to be clear I'm not blaming anyone for anything. I don't think this was some wrong done somebody. I'm not saying the course developers have failed to do something – for all I know this was a deliberate choice made in the fullness of their wisdom about training therapists to work with service members. They are certainly more experienced at this work than I am! And I'm neither saying that the feelings and principles that many therapists hold about violence are wrong or invalid (though I will say that some of them, I think, are based on mistaken information) nor am I passing any moral judgment on military service members whatsoever, nor on militaries as institutions.
What I'm saying is: damn, that's a hell of an elephant in the living room. I am full of questions and speculations.
As I said, maybe this was a clever and deliberate choice to side-step a scenario they had reason to believe would be counter-productive. Alternatively, maybe it was accidentally-on-purpose: they didn't consciously mean to leave all explicit mention about violence out, but its a topic about which they're uncomfortable – perhaps anticipating controversy – so it just failed to get included. Or was it just a blind spot, just something it never occurred to them was at issue? Or maybe it was – and I find this the most intriguing – itself an example of military culture in action.
One of the things realizing this forcefully reminded me is the tendency of at least the US military to use euphemisms, such as "neutralize" for "kill" or "destroy". Or maybe that is unfair, and within-culture they're just jargon and buzzwords, the way all professional cultures have jargon and buzzwords. But they strike me, as an outsider, as euphemisms, because they seem very evasive. I am hardly the first to note militaristic use of euphemisms [Digression #2] disapprovingly; in particular, it's something that rubs many who oppose war the wrong way, escalating their ire.
Do people in military culture not realize that using euphemisms is widely experienced by outsiders as antagonizing? It touches the I am being lied to nerve, the somebody is trying to pull a fast one by laying a line of jive nerve. There may be very good reasons to use euphemisms within the culture, but when communicating across the cultural perimeter with outsiders, it causes communications problems.
But what is fascinating to me is that this provoked a realization that I have another "belief" I have picked up about the US military, which was not probed in the self-assessment and which this training is doing nothing to dispel.
Or rather, two "beliefs".
On one hand, there's the stereotype of military people being down-to-earth, concrete, direct, with little patience for needless fanciness, and no tolerance for bullshit. The positive form of the stereotype is that they are refreshingly direct and honest. The negative form of the stereotype is that they're a little simple and crude, with intolerance for subtlety or ambiguity or abstract reasoning, and even anti-intellectual.
On the other hand, there's... well, almost the exact opposite. This idea that military speech is elliptical (and "ellipsical" for want of a better term), round-about, indirect. It uses euphemisms and delicately (squeamishly?) avoids certain words and certain topics. It makes heavy use of poetics such as metonymous symbols ("the flag", and here how "firearms" here represents violence) and abstractions (such as "honor" and "valor", a heck of a lot more about below).
It suddenly struck me how the communication style I associate with military culture – and which I was picking up in this training – is what would be termed in any other entity than the military preciousness, or even prissiness.
Military culture is one in which there is enormous restraint of speech, in both the good and bad senses of restraint. Military culture is one in which there are all sorts of rules, both spoken and unspoken, about how you express yourself, and whether you express yourself – and often you are not to. One of the video interviewees, a family member of a service member, said:
"I’d say the biggest difference between someone in the military and someone out of the military is that they give up a lot of the, they give up a lot of the freedoms that they fight to protect. They give up a lot of the ability to speak freely about things that they do care passionately about [....]"That passage is in the context of explaining self-sacrifice as a military cultural value – the point is that this is a sacrifice service members make for the benefit of others – and the fact of how constrained service members' speech is both by explicit rules and cultural norms is not otherwise discussed.
Getting a bit ahead of myself here, later in the training, reflecting both on what I was being explicitly told about military culture and noticing in the communications of and in the training itself, I realized that there's a value very important to military culture (or at least US military culture) not enumerated in the list they gave us: politeness and courtesy.
Here's one of the bullet points from the Culturally Competent Behaviors handout for the course:
Before providing services, seek information on acceptable behaviors, courtesies, customs, and expectations that are unique to the Service members and Veterans served by your program or agency.I think that's great advice, but it's fascinating to me (as are some other things on that list) in contrast to other cultural competency training I've had.
There's something about privilege here. Nobody has ever suggested in any of the trainings I've had about working with ethnic minorities that the student/therapist learn more than how to avoid specific acts of offense (e.g. don't show the bottom of your shoes to Muslims; when handing something, even a business card, to someone Japanese, use both hands). Nobody has ever suggested – though perhaps they should have – that it's incumbent on the therapist to learn the status system of the culture in question and use its own honorifics.
The trainings I'm familiar with use – and this is all left implicit – what we can term the "Daniel-san/Mr. Miyagi" Protocol. In "The Karate Kid" (1984), the American kid, Daniel, addresses Miyagi, in the respectful American mode of a youngster to an elder, as "Mr. Miyagi." Miyagi, the middle-aged Japanese man, addresses Daniel, in the respectful Japanese mode of equals, as "Daniel-san". Each uses the forms of their own culture to show respect: they do not use the other's culture's forms.
But I assure you, the Federal government, as represented by the creators of this course, absolutely expects the student to learn the status terms and honorifics and "behaviors, courtesies, and customs" of military culture. In addition to explicitly admonishing us to do so, that's apparently the entirety of the second two hour course.
In a sense, other cultural minorities daren't have such high expectations of the mainstream. "Not being awful" is about all they, rightly or wrongly, feel they can expect or insist on. It's as if the Federal government were saying, on behalf of service members, "Members of military culture absolutely are entitled to be treated as if their cultural norms and forms are just as valid and important as the mainstream's, and we expect outsiders to this culture to conform to it if they are going to work with this population."
Which is... kind of cool. Privileged, yes, but inspiring, no? It suggests an intriguing standard of inclusion and respect.
But back to the point about politeness and courtesy: it is part of military culture to be very concerned with being courteous, in many dimensions. Some of it is a high priority on using the proper cultural forms and strictly observing the rules of discourse (respect for rules), but some of it is a general concern for demonstrating respect for one's interlocutor (respect for people). Some of it has to do with speech, but, of course, scrupulous propriety in dress and ritual is something military culture is also justly famed for.
One of the little case study vignettes in the training involved an injured Marine who presented for treatment not in his uniform, which he was supposed to be in; the therapist in the case misinterpreted this as suggestive of depression (not taking care of his appearance) or feelings of conflict towards the service, when what was really going on was that his injury, to his foot, meant that he couldn't wear regulation boots, and he'd been told by his doctor to wear sneakers with his uniform, an idea so odious to him, he applied for and got a medical exemption from the requirement to wear a uniform, rather than wear it wrong.
What is interesting to me here is how this is discussed: in terms of his seeing this as "desecrating the uniform" (exact quote) and "desecrating the sanctity of the uniform" (also an exact quote). The language is that of piety, but the issue is the formal and ceremonial demonstration of respect. To "desecrate" the uniform is to send a message of disrespect toward what that uniform stands for. Note also another example of material objects being use metonymously as symbols for abstractions: the uniform represents the Marine Corps, itself, and by extension all Marines, and all they value; and conspicuous scrupulousity in wearing it correctly – that is showing respect to the physical uniform – is a show of respect to the collective enterprise.
Mainstream Americans basically never do this, except by cultural exchange with either military culture or with other cultures that do. Flag veneration is the exception that proves the rule: even Americans who get all hot under the collar about flag burning are radically worse – inconsistent, incoherent forms – at object veneration than in cultures which do object veneration regularly. The "Ugly American" stereotype, which has at least a grain of truth, is not just about Americans being generically, interpersonal rude, but Americans being bad at showing respect and not sympathetic (or showing active antipathy) to the idea of demonstrating a deference to things and practices other cultures hold demand such deference.
That said, mainstream Americans often admire this aspect of military culture; it is an important part of what makes it "cool" to those who do. It is very much part of military mystique.
Another idea about service members that they discussed is that service members are disciplined.
Now, "disciplined" means a whole lot of things in American usage, many of which can be applied to service members. One pertinent but less obvious way in which it gets used is to designate a person who doesn't just pop off and say whatever comes to mind; who thinks before he speaks, or acts; who has "self-control" and shows discretion; who is respectful in word and deed; who is conscientious about what others may consider mere niceties; who has demanding standards for their conduct and strives to live up to them; whose behavior is well-ordered and dignified.
This is an attractive trait, even compellingly so; Mainstream Americans like people who are thus.
The reverse is not true. But I get ahead of myself.
The next part of the training was about the idea of "the military ethos". There was some definitely Cultural Competency 101 first, about cultures and values, but I did appreciate how they used an iceberg metaphor to set out the ideas of explicit and implicit cultural values.
Then they got right on into the Honor and Loyalty and Valor and Excellence talk.
I immediately had a slight bad reaction to this, and so I immediately questioned what that was about. Am I cynical and jaded about espousal of abstract values? No, I'm actually really into values talk, and those are all perfectly moral values. Do I cynically feel that the military shouldn't be using that language? No, not particularly. So, what is it?
I realized that my hostility was aroused by similarity to a previous experience with a population which used abstract virtue language in sometimes problematic ways.
Therapists.
Therapists don't justify their choice of profession with talk about Honor and Loyalty and Valor and Excellence. No, the therapist justification is Helping People. And when a therapist says they are a therapist because they wanted to Help People, they are offering that up as a kind of motivational alibi, rather than saying something more true and less savory, like "I like to tell people how to run their lives" or "I enjoy being an authority figure" or "I am trying to make up for a moral flaw by being professionally virtuous" or "I like drama and upset people" or I don't even know what.
Once I noticed that commonality, another lightbulb turned on: when a therapist talks about their motivations and reasons for being a therapist only in terms that are vague, self-congratulatory moral abstractions, they're avoiding admitting something. Figured the same is true of this video.
Then came this slide, "Reasons people join the military":
Individuals who join the military do so for a variety of reasons to include:To their credit, at least some of those are concrete and pragmatic (anything to do with money). But the same sort of hole is in this list as someone who hangs with therapists might have noticed: None of those items is "Because one might like it."
• To continue family tradition
• To serve their country
• To support family
• To get out or stay out of trouble with the law
• To do something noble with their life
• To obtain money for college
• To have access to free medical care
• To protect people, country, and way of life
• To be a part of team of something bigger than self
• To get out of poverty
• To get out of adverse life experiences
• To travel
• Due to an inherent sense of selflessness
Presumably, some non-zero percentage of soldiers get into soldiering because, just like therapists become therapists because they figure they'll enjoy therapisting, they think they'll like it. The idea of being a war fighter appeals. Perhaps the idea of getting to participate in legitimized and sanctioned violence. Perhaps the idea of contending for real stakes in life-or-death circumstances. Perhaps because they love firing a gun or flying a plane or commanding a submarine. Perhaps because they like the hierarchy and command structure. Perhaps, like the song says, "for to hear the cannons rattlin' and the music so grand."
Annnnnnd we're back to the violence thing: in the eyes of those who disapprove of violence, most of these are not legitimate grounds for becoming a war fighter. For people who don't universally disapprove of violence, these are not (necessarily) problematic. But an awful lot of therapists universally disapprove of violence.
I don't think suppressing or concealing these motivations helps anybody. Certainly, it keeps a kind of peace: so long as war fighters don't speak openly of their appreciation of warrioring, and take a pose of engaging in it only reluctantly and out of necessity, those who disapprove of warfare don't turn on them personally. That doesn't seem adequate to the relational needs of psychotherapy. "Unconditional positive regard" it aint.
I suspect there's a whole bunch of things about being in the military which are reasons people are in the military, which people in the military don't talk about much or do so only obliquely.
One that emerged from another of the training videos was that the US military in all its branches takes amazingly young people and gives them astonishing – to them, no less than anybody – amounts of responsibility.
People in the military, we’re very disciplined. Civilians are disciplined as well when it comes to, I would say, I see the difference that civilians are disciplined when it comes to things they want to do. But what the military stresses is that regardless if you want to do it or not, it has to be done. So, you have to have that discipline to do it even when you don’t want to do something. So, I think that’s one of the few things that separates myself from civilian friends is just overall discipline and responsibility. I’m only twenty three and there a lot of my friends that are the same age that they just don’t do the same things I do.And
Military members, they shoulder a level of responsibility that typically far exceeds that of their civilian peers. So just imagine, you know, a lot of your young twenty-something-year-olds who are having to make often times life-and-death decisions in the context of serving in a battle zone. Think of the war fighter at my rank may be a Commanding Officer on a nuclear submarine making some very important decisions—things I couldn’t possibly fathom as a healthcare provider. So, there’s often times a level of responsibility that is quite enormous, and from that stems quite a bit pride and a sense of accomplishmentNow, a lot of people think of responsibility as a negative thing to have, but actually, it can be pretty alluring in a whole bunch of ways. Pride and a sense of accomplishment are two; another is giving one a sense of meaning, and validating one's sense of capability and worth. It feels good to feel able; it feels good to feel one is making a contribution; it feels good to be tested and to pass.
Young adults in our society mostly never get that. At least not in that sort of measure.
Which brings me to the next interesting thing that occurred to me. Listening to the ways that various interviewees talked about the military ethos, and used value language to describe their experiences, I found myself thinking, like we Rogerians do, "What is it they are trying to get me to understand? There is something they are trying to be insistent about, but it's not clear; what is it?"
Eventually, I found something between the lines. It's hard to express directly; it works best if we start with what I hypothesize is the other side.
The US military, and probably all militaries ever, have a really quite low tolerance for fuckups. When somebody isn't dependable, when somebody doesn't exercise adequate restraint in their conduct, they get marginalized so they can't do too much damage, or simply gotten rid of.
All these youngsters join up, and have it drummed into them that they have these huge responsibilities to their fellow warriors and their nation, and they must do their jobs right. It's not just that they have to cover their squad mates in fire-fights, but things like, "If you don't clean this surface correctly, the guy who is going to try to land a plane on this deck will die and maybe take a bunch of us with it." And they discover, yes, they have it in them to do their jobs that well, that dependably. They are somebody who pulls their weight and can be counted on.
And furthermore, they discover they are in a whole society of people who are equally determined to be dependable, to pull their weight and be somebody who can be counted on. That can be a down-right rapturous experience; I know, because there's other ways to have at least some of that experience, such as through the performing arts, and having tasted it, I can attest it's positively intoxicating. It's like falling in love. Or maybe it is falling in love: this probably is more the basis of that intense camaraderie shared by veterans who served together than common adversity or common purpose.
Civilian society, as a whole, is, in contrast, replete with fuckups. People who can't get out of their own way enough to be depended on, people who don't take commitments seriously, people who are exploitative, who phone it in, to try to get away with minimal contributions, who don't care about those who rely on their work, who don't want to be relied upon, people who don't want to have self-restraint. We don't get to throw those people out of society, so there they are, being part of civilian society, fucking up, and their fucking up being tolerated.
People in the military, who subscribe to the discipline of speech and courtesy described above, are way, way, way, way, way too polite to actually come out and say, "We're different from civilians because we're not used to putting up with fuckups," but that is what it sounds like is lurking between the lines. It feels like they're trying to apologetically and politely say something that more bluntly put might sound like, "See, among us, fucking up is not okay; being a fuck up is not okay. We have these values and stuff which say it's not okay. And we totally get that that's okay in civilian life, where if you want to be a fuckup, that's your free choice. In our culture, the military culture, we see that as not a legitimate choice. We see that as bad – and comport ourselves accordingly."
If I am correct that this is the subtext, it also explains some of the difficulty that discharged service members can experience reintegrating into civilian society. The go-to explanation for difficulties reintegrating is usually PTSD or other socio/emotional "damage" that prevents reintegration. But that would be how civilian society sees it: "if you can't join us, it must be because you're broken." But what if it's just straight-up acculturative stress, from (re)joining a society with a very different value system, and one which does not support and espouse values that were not merely emotionally important, but plainly and obviously organized the left society in ways one prized?
I know that experience sucks, because I've had it; anyone who moves from a society with higher standards to one with lower standards (in any domain one cares about) experiences it, too.
Anyways, this is long and rambling and long, and I'm going to just end now because the month is almost over and I need to get something out. I feel like I'm probably forgetting something interesting, but this will have to do for now.
Digression #1: Re the political affiliations of therapists as a profession.
Verdant Labs just published this interactive infographic on the political distribution across a big number of jobs. Here's the relevant chunk:
Here it is in words:
Mental Health over all: 90 Democrats for every 10 Republicans
Guidance Counselor: 80 D / 20 R
Child Psychiatrist: 83 D / 17 R
Neuropsychologist: 84 D / 16 R
School Counselor: 85 D / 15 R
School Psychologist: 85 D / 15 R
Mental Health Counselor: 86 D / 14 R
Psychiatrist: 87 D / 13 R
Marriage/Family Therapist: 89 D / 11 R
Psychologist: 81 D / 9 R
Psychoanalyst: 95 D / 5 R
Psychotherapist: 95 D / 5 R
Mental Health Therapist: 98 D / 2 R
Research Psychologist: 100 D / 0 R
Obviously, being a Democrat is not identical with being hostile to firearms, but there is, shall we say, some overlap.
[return]
Digression #2: Re military euphemisms:
A Formal Application
by Donald Baker
"The poets apparently want to rejoin the human race." — Time Magazine
I shall begin by learning to throw
the knife, first at trees, until it sticks
in the trunk and quivers every time;
next from a chair, using only wrist
and fingers, at a thing on the ground,
a fresh ant hill or a fallen leaf;
then at a moving object, perhaps
a pine cone swinging on twine, until
I pot it at least twice in three tries.
Meanwhile, I shall be teaching the birds
that the skinny fellow in sneakers
is a source of suet and bread crumbs,
first putting them on a shingle nailed
to a pine tree, next scattering them
on the needles, closer and closer
to my seat, until the proper bird,
a towhee, I think, in black and rust
and gray, takes tossed crumbs six feet away.
Finally, I shall coordinate
conditioned reflex and functional
form and qualify as Modern Man.
You see the splash of blood and feathers
and the blade pinning it to the tree?
It's called an "Audubon Crucifix."
The phrase has pleasing (even pious)
connotations, like Arbeit Macht Frie,
"Molotov Cocktail," and Enola Gay.
[return]
This post brought to you by the 48 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.
Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!
