Two Tales of Woe

As a practicing psychologist, I have interviewed and evaluated a diverse population of clients.  Of the many people I have seen, two cases stand out in my mind that I will discuss in this blog.

After I had obtained my license as a psychologist, I spent one day a week going to East Los Angeles Regional Center, where I evaluated individuals that had intellectual disabilities or intellectual developmental disorders. Formerly, those individuals that fell under this rubric were classified from a range of Mild to Severe Mental Retardation.  I like that the term retardation is no longer used as it had an obvious pejorative meaning to those who suffered from this disability.

Prior to testing the assigned cases I would have at Regional Center, I would do a mental status, and then interview the clients that needed to be evaluated.  One such client I interviewed was a female, about 25 years old, whose condition fell within the Mild range of disability.  Upon discussing her early childhood, she told me something I have never forgotten. It pretty much went like this:  When I was 5, I stuck my hand into an electric socket, and never was the same.  When I heard this, it left me speechless. The automatic therapeutic response:  How do you feel about this, I knew would have been ridiculous.  I do not recall exactly what I said but it might have been something to the effect that you have managed well despite what had happened.  Because of her very young age, I explained to her that she was not to blame nor to be held responsible for this accident.  However, I understood instantaneously the sorrow and pain this young woman had suffered.  It was her clear memory of this unfortunate event in her life, in conjunction with the realization that nothing could be done to reverse its consequences that, without a doubt, added to her hardship.

The second case involved a divorced Latina woman in her 40’s from Mexico.  I saw her in the ’90’s during the Welfare to Work program that President Clinton had initiated.  Upon interviewing her, she told me a very sad event that had occurred when she was 18 years old.  During that time, she was engaged to her future husband.  She revealed that her relationship with her future in-laws had been always a good one.  She described her husband’s parents as both kind and generous. 

The client’s father-in-law owned a small cottage home about 80 miles from Mexico City in the countryside.  He loved plants and had gone to oversee how his garden was doing at the end of the week.  Upon reaching his home, he was greeted by Mexico’s law enforcement who accused him of planting marijuana that was illegal.  When he tried to convince them of his innocence, they refused to believe him.  The result was that these policemen severely beat him leaving him badly injured, away from his wife and family.  When he returned to his wife, she became frantic and terrified, justly so, insofar as her beloved husband succumbed six weeks later.  This poor man died of internal hemorrhaging related to the punishment he had absorbed at the hands of the policeman.

From the day of the death of her husband’s father, her soon to be mother-in-law became so embittered that her attitude toward others had undergone a radical change.  She now became an angry short-tempered woman that treated everyone she knew, with the exception of her son, in a curt mean manner.   When I heard this story, I thought how an evil act can spread, like a contagious disease, and permeate not only the one suffering the loss, but also those around that person.

But did it have to be that way?  As I constantly tell those of my clients who are angered at how they have been treated, the world does not always treat us fairly.  In my blog, A Negative Universe, I spoke of gratitude as an uplifting quality so essential to our sense of wellness as vulnerable human beings.  My roommate from college and very close friend, Jack Trachtenberg, commented on my last blog, Postscript, that underscores this point:

I am reminded of a radio interview I heard some years ago done by Philadelphia area psychologist, Dan Gottlieb. Gottlieb is almost quadriplegic from an auto accident in the 1970s. His interview was with concentration camp survivor, Gerda Weissman Klein. He asked her, given all the losses in her life, whether she ever got angry. She replied, “Of course I do. I am human. — But let me tell you what I do when I feel like that. I go to the refrigerator. I open the door. I see that I have food to eat. — And I am grateful.”

We humans have the capacity to be resilient.  It is a great gift that has helped us survive all these years on planet earth.  I would maintain that an integral part of our resilience is the ability to have gratitude even in the most difficult and tragic circumstances of our lives.  Thank you, Ms. Klein, for both recognizing and sharing this virtue with us.