Does Mindfulness Actually Increase Stereotyping in the Workplace?

I found the following quite fascinating. Many who study and practice mindfulness are of course inspired by the wondrous lifestyle changes they experience through regular mindfulness practices; which I would add, often includes the development of cultural awareness. On the flip side, listening to a recent radio broadcast about the pros and cons of diversity training in the workplace on Talk of The Nation (National Public Radio) I found comments made by Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, extremely interesting and cause for further inquiry.

Paluck put forth that becoming more mindful and conscious of diversity actually may increase stereotyping in the workplace! According to Paluck, "One topic that's been brought up is that when training and education may activate bias rather than reduce it, and so this is something that psychologists study quite a bit. So when you make these explicit and conscious attempts to regulate your thoughts - and that's not necessarily what all the diversity training does, but we do know that this can sometimes exaggerate stereotyping and raise issues that might otherwise not come up in the workplace. And oftentimes, women and minorities are, you know justifiably upset when this happens."

In light of this, should we thus make attempts to become less mindful? If we know that our attempts to become less judgmental, less biased, and more humane and more civil only serve to make the workplace situation worse, should we therefore curtail attempts to educate workers about diversity? Should we discourage workers to practice enlightened thinking around issues of diversity? My own inclination is to say absolutely "no"; yet based on the above, an important question is raised: is it even possible to consciously increase our emotional intelligence quotient (eq)? Or, are we merely opening a new can of worms - in the form of increased judgments and critical thoughts - when we attempt to do so?

What Paluk identifies is a fascinating occurance: when we practice conscious thinking, we also paradoxically somehow send off more harmful vibes - the exact opposite of positive EQ.

What she describes may actually make some sense. We all know iritating people who seem to do and say all the right things, yet underneath, (their sometimes facades) seem full of moralistic judgments and toxic thinking. I would like to believe, though, it may only be a temporary phenomenon. That over time any person's diligent, authentic efforts to shape EQ and character eventually pay off for the best, and, ultimately can serve to contribute to a more compassionate and socially conscious workplace.

Audio link to broadcast
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=124495770&m=124495767

Positive Psychology and Schizophrenia

Many people are probably not aware that much of the work on family therapy actually began with research on schizophrenia. According to Nichols et al., researchers felt that the "strange patterns of interaction [in families in which psychosis was present] were so dramatic," if they could understand such an extreme condition, it would likely shed light on so many other less extreme mental health conditions as well. (Nichols, et al., 2007) Ultimately, doing this work, researchers were able to identify patterns in families that were not healthy. Such patterns include extreme conflicting messages such as the "double bind," rigid family roles, faulty parental models of identification, and the "rubber fence." The rubber fence, identified by Wynne, is parental rigidity that limits outside contact for the children. It is particularly ironic because it often occurs in the lives of many children who need outside contact the most, who live in such a toxic family culture.

The study of schizophrenia and family culture has certainly provided significant measure of understanding of disease, of why people get sick. That is one part of the equation. However, the other side of it, e.g., the dangers and consequences of focusing only on disease etiology, is that using this perspective we also tend to blame, label, and diagnose. Doing so, we tend to lose focus of the most important aspects of recovery, such as strengths, positive qualities and beneficial characteristics of both the individuals involved and whole families.(Seligman, et al., 2006)

References

Nichols, M.P.; Shwartz, R.C. (2007). Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods (8th edition). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Seligman, M.; Rashid, T.; Parks, A.C. (November 2006) American Psychologist. pp.774-778.

Creating and Re-framing Your Life Story

To cultivate positive mental well-being, in my view, we can choose to look at our lives from a perspective of the clinical model, e.g., the disease model of health care, in which the focus has inevitably been on "fixing problems" particularly through the use of medications, or we can look at our lives from a positive, holistic, and person-centered standoint. And certainly the more informed we are, and aware of essential developmental issues, conflicts, and stages, for example, the psychosocial stages laid out by Erik Erikson (which have become foundational in modern psychological thought), the better we are able to manage stress, transition, and change in our lives.

However, in my view embracing the notion of life-story and of learning to reframe our lives from a positive, holistic,and person-centered perspective is critical to well-being. Reframing is making a choice to see situations in productive, positive, and life-affirming ways, as opposed to seeing them in destructive, life-alienating ways. The reason reframing is so important is because our perspective on our lives makes a huge difference in the quality of our lives; our thoughts create our well-being. McAdams puts forth that the way we view each of the important challenges faced from our pasts, interestingly, also makes a big difference on our overall well-being today, and how we deal with our present life and future challenges.

This "re-framing of mind" is fundamentally how we perceive who we are as individuals: it is our sense of self, including self-esteem and self-efficacy. In other words, we each have a choice of how we want to view our past and what led to the creation of the present "I" or self. Until we are able to make some sense of the past, and learn to reframe it in a useful and positive way, we will inevitably have difficulty accepting ourselves as individuals, and have difficulty moving forward. Most of us have hurts from the past; some, of course, worse than others. For many it is difficult to forgive, to move on, to re-initiate the process of living. However, I think it is important to keep in mind that the only person we hurt by not being able to reframe the past is ourselves. The power of story helps us learn to do that. We can learn to view our lives within the bigger context of story by imagining and creating stories of challenge, and ultimately, triumph.

It has been said that, "our biography becomes our biology." And, Dr. James Pennebaker has performed research to show the benefit to our health of disclosing one's most difficult, deepest, intimate life experiences through the mere act of writing such thoughts and feelings in a journal for minutes a day. In one of his studies of college students, only six months of such disclosure through the use of journal writing, students showed significantly fewer visits to the university health center. (McAdams, 2006, p.31). McAdam says the reason is because inhibiting and holding onto such feelings requires physiological work, though it is subtle, and we may not be aware of it. The reality is suppression of feelings becomes exhausting to us. When we disclose either verbally or in a journal, we are letting go of the armor needed to hold onto or suppress painful, dark feelings. It also allows us to begin gaining insight into these events and begin seeing them in more solution oriented ways, if we choose so.

References

McAdams, D. P. (2006). The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. New York , NY: Oxford University Press.

Why is it so difficult to discuss end-of-life issues in American culture?

Modern Americans have a difficult time dealing with painful emotions, such as ones associated with death and sickness, and we often respond with denial (putting up walls and defenses, and using forms of distraction), harshness ("just be a man"), or confusion (converting pain into another emotion like anger without realizing it). In some cultures death is not thought upon negatively. Yes, of couse it is painful to lose a loved one; however, many cultures regard death in a celebratory way. Death is viewed as a transition - albeit a significant one - along the spiritual journey of life.

I lost my father to cancer when I was three. Our family did not discuss his death much, and immediately following, my mom took us cross-country to San Diego and Disneyland as an "escape." If our family had dealt with the pain of death head on, perhaps a trip would have been helpful - sometimes a change of scenery can be useful and refreshing during a stressful period. However, I think the combination of denying emotions and fleeing a situation was not the most beneficial, and perhaps conveyed a messsage to our internal selves of fear and powerlessness.

So, how does one deal with or manage difficult emotions such as ones associated with death effectively? According to dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) a mindfulness based approach, "No appropriate psychological technique can change a natural feeling into a different one. It would not be right to [try] to change the feeling of depression about losing a loved one into the feeling of indifference. This [is] an attempt to truncate your feelings, to deny them. So emotional regulation isn't about making one feeling into another. It's about changing our emotional state altogether," states Thomas Marra, Ph.D., president of the Center for Dialectical Behavior Therapy in Monterey, CA.

The keys, according to mindfulness based therapies, are acknowledgment, responsibility, and choice. If we acknowledge the pain we are not denying it; rather, we are embracing our humanness, admitting we are emotional beings, however, that does not mean succumbing to our emotions. It means also taking responsibility for our feelings, and recognizing we possess the ability to make choices in how we respond to situations.

In my view,one of the main reasons Americans have trouble dealing with death is because we tend to fear our emotional beings and therefore also deny and disregard our internal self, and in a sense our innate humanness.

References
Marra, T. (2004). Depressed and Anxious: The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook for Overcoming Depression and Anxiety. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

What is Mindful Communication?
Mindful or compassionate communication is a way of learning to connect with others from a heart level. It is about being present in the moment and listening with one's whole being. Although compassionate communication is truly an organic (and historically timeless) process, it is highly influenced by recent work of Dr. Marshall Rosenberg and his method of Nonviolent Communication (NVC).